BrandKnew May 2014

Branding matters. Because branding matters.

Published by ISD Global

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07 09 Dear Friends: The heat is on! And how. Therefore, we decided to put together a cool issue that ventilates interesting insights on what different brands are upto. IKEA’s playful logo is worth taking a peek into. Pinterest has become the toast of Brand Town and the feature on how brands can use the fast growing SM Platform is an eye opener. We are well and truly into the era of ‘personal branding’ and the article on The A to Z of Personal Branding bears testimony to that. No need to be overt or to be shouting from the rooftops: ‘Great Branding is Invisible’ tells you why! ‘The myths about working with great brands’ is broken in the article similarly captioned and there is sound advise on how to develop your brand voice. Am certain that the feature on what your logo colour tells about your company will delight many a brand connoisseur.

We do a bit of crystal ball gazing through ‘ The Future of Digital Marketing is Pure PR’. All this and more to content with. Happy reading!

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Suresh Dinakaran @sureshdinakaran

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Managing Editor: Suresh Dinakaran Creative Head/Director Operations: Pravin Ahir Magazine Concept & Design/ New Media Specialist: Mufaddal Joher Country Head, UK: Sagar Patil Country Head, India: Rohit Unni Digital Marketing Strategist: Mark Cijo Associate: Brand Success: Andre Van Helsdingen Web Specialist: Prasanta Kumar Sahu Online Support: Mahendra Kumar Behera

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CONTENTS

How to be a brand leader Great Branding Is Invisible When Branding Is Too Good: A Cautionary Tale From New York’s Citi Bike 5 Myths About Working With Big Brands 5 Tips for Getting Consumers Comfortable Sharing Data Five things brands should be doing with Pinterest A Playful New Brand Identity For Ikea What Your Logo’s Color Says About Your Company How big data and personalisation will make the future of brand communications U-shaped Why the Future of Digital Marketing Is Pure PR The Complete A to Z Guide to Personal Branding How Cereal Boxes Are Designed To Hypnotize You 10 Crucial Lessons From History’s Greatest Graphic Designers Develop Your Brand Voice: Three Keys to Killer Messaging Book, Line & Sinker

How to be a brand leader Jeremy Davies Justin King’s forthcoming departure from Sainsbury’s, with the supermarket thriving, and Tesco’s troubles since Sir Terry Leahy stood down, have got us thinking about leadership.

As Manchester United fans have discovered this season, a successful brand depends on strong, consistent leadership that commands total respect. It holds as true for marketleading brands as it does for leaders of people.

When a market-leading brand starts acting out of character, you know there’s something odd going on. Innocent’s new Super Smoothies range, for example, seems, at first glance, at odds with the brand’s personality. Functional foods may be popular at a time when consumers are acutely conscious of what they consume, but their appeal is rooted in a sense of anxiety. Innocent as a brand has always had the feel-good factor. No scientific mumbo jumbo ever infiltrated the brand’s unique tone of voice before. Where’s the fun in antioxidants?

Since the term ‘challenger brand’ emerged in the late-1990s, ‘think like a challenger’ has become conventional marketing wisdom. To become a market leader, though, you need to first behave like one. Think like a challenger, act like a leader may seem a tricky balance, but it’s hardly unprecedented.

Did you ever hear of the mouse that roared?

Tesco’s series of mishaps began under Sir Terry, with the ill-fated discount brands strategy (foreign misadventures notwithstanding). From this perspective, at a time when Aldi and Lidl were just beginning to steal share from the Big Four, the move made sense. But market leaders should lead, not follow. Tesco had plenty to differentiate it from the hard discounters: quality, provenance and traceability, not to mention the relentless customer focus behind the old “Every little helps” slogan of their range. Instead, it chose to dance to their tune.

By contrast, when Walkers found its position as the leading crisp brand under threat from fresh brands offering exciting new ingredients, its response was to innovate, not imitate.

Using the full range of tools at its disposal (distribution, awareness, social media, Gary Lineker), the ‘Do Us A

Flavour’ campaign took on its rivals at their own game, but on its own terms. Five years on, they are doing it again.

Napolina behaved like a leader even before it reached the top. Central to the brand’s leadership behaviour is its consistent focus on being ‘at the heart of Italian cooking’ – which gives the brand both authenticity and the elasticity to stretch into numerous product categories. It behaved like the market leader, and the market followed.

Some brands are able to effectively invent a new category (New Covent Garden springs to mind), but even in saturated markets the combination of sharp consumer insight and creative execution can propel a new brand to the top. Look at what’s happened in baby food, where Plum and Ella’s Kitchen left Heinz, for all its marketing muscle, far behind.

Numerous challenger brands have successfully changed the conversation in their markets by focusing on a core message and adapting to connect both emotionally and rationally.

After all, why challenge when you can lead?

The three pillars of brand leadership thinking: Know your territory – where does it start, where does it end, how could you make it bigger?

Attack to defend – you’ve got a better chance of holding your ground if you play to your strengths.

Think two steps ahead – the higher ground has a better view. Make smarter use of research to generate insights into where the market is going, and get there before the competition.

And don’t forget that mouse – there’s no need to roar, but be sure everyone knows who’s boss.

Jeremy Davies is new business director of The Brand Nursery

Great Branding Is Invisible

The thumpf of a BMW’s door closing, the muted click of calculator buttons, a human on the phone. It hooks you in.

Michael Raisanen “The devil is in the detail” is a cliché that happens to be true, but let’s turn it around: The magic is in the detail. What constitutes quality in a product, besides the raw materials you choose? The attention paid to detail.

short, quality resides in the hidden details that aren’t obvious to most--until you touch the product and look at it up close.

It’s craftsmanship that gives luxury fashion brands longevity and which lets them weather trends.

Look at a knock-off Gucci handbag and consider its original counterpart: The difference, besides the “leather” chosen, is in the stitching, the inside lining, the zippers, and so on. In

Brands are no different from the products and services that they represent. Frantically searching for the one “Unique Positioning Statement (UPS)” or logo design that is going to simultaneously sum up precisely what your company stands for and differentiate it from the rest of the pack is in some ways a meaningless battle. Taglines may be catchy, but they don’t, in the end, make people buy products. What determines whether a woman buys Chanel No. 5 or Issey Miyake’s L’Eau d’Issey Florale? Not taglines but how either smells on her skin.

TAGLINES MAY BE CATCHY, BUT THEY DON’T MAKE PEOPLE BUY PRODUCTS.

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What makes you so special?

What makes your brand unique and better than the competition is the compounded totality of many little things.

That means you can’t just consider the attention given to producing an outstanding service or product--you also have to think about how the sales force and support team treats its customers and how the receptionist answers the phone.

The Jawbone UP24 fitness tracking device is a good example. After diligently tracking my sleep, workout regime, and diet, I became properly addicted to the wristband and to its accompanying iOS app. When the band suddenly stopped working, after three months, I flew into a minor panic. All my data (and exercise momentum) would be lost, I worried. But Jawbone turned out to have an excellent support system. They troubleshot the problem with me seamlessly, on email and over the phone. They used human beings, not robots. I followed the progress of my issue via a concise thread on their support ticketing system. After they quickly exhausted all possible solutions and saw that the device was still malfunctioning, they shipped me a replacement band immediately. I became loyal to the brand thanks to the humane and efficient treatment I received. The extra attention taken by Jawbone to make sure that their staff was professional and courteous--while making sure that I never got lost in a maze of telephone drones or automated emails-made a huge difference.

certain resistance, and so on.

For those who remember, think about the perfect resistance and muted click of the Hewlett-Packard scientific calculator buttons, compared to their competitors Casio and Texas Instruments. The latter two companies clearly hadn’t spent a lot of energy thinking about what it would feel like to press down the keys. And it made a difference.

Advertising and branding should be thought of in the same way. Yes, the big idea is important, but success hinges on its execution, consistency, and attention to each and every word. Do define the brand with succinct messaging, but also trust that consumers will recognize the collective positive attributes of the brand rather than just its tagline. Make sure your communications are well crafted and recognizable. All touch points need to be carefully considered, down to every HTML email campaign.

Apple and Crate & Barrel stand out as excellent examples of how to design the perfect email. Google’s emails, on the other hand, lack consistency and seem rather haphazardly generated. Emails from Apple and Crate & Barrel are advantageously laid out, with beautiful imagery that’s logically arranged and information that’s easy to digest (if not concise). They’re not afraid to make us scroll; they don’t cram content above the fold.

All these details, you may think, aren’t invisible at all. What’s really invisible is the brand’s aptitude to carefully organize every detail, whether we see it or not. It all adds up, and that’s a lot.

Keep the details invisible.

It’s the combination of myriad details that shapes brand image in the minds of customers. These details may be transmitted subconsciously. Not everyone recognizes that hand stitching makes a serious difference. Expertly executed details, imperceptible to most, should create a sense of magic and wonder. Think of an upmarket German car, such as an Audi, BMW or Mercedes. When you are at the BMW showroom and you step into, say, a 5 Series model, the satisfyingly clean thumpf sound that the door makes as you shut it signifies quality. There’s no rattling, no sound of sheet metal being slammed, just that confidence-inspiring, compact sound. It’s the sound of outside noise and discomfort being sealed off while you enter a safe, comfortable place.

Behind the steering wheel are carefully wrought details, too: the smell, the way the seat feels, the feel of your hands on the steering wheel, the way the dashboard buttons have a

Michael Raisanen is the founder and CEO of TIO Agency (www.tioagency.com), a full service creative marketing agency based in New Canaan, Connecticut. TIO’s interdisciplinary approach to brand communications includes brand strategy, design, advertising, PR and digital.

When Branding Is Too Good: A Cautionary Tale From New York’s Citi Bike WHY WOULD ANY OTHER COMPANY WANT TO JOIN CITI AS A SPONSOR? Shaunacy Ferro New Yorkers have racked up more than 7 million trips on Citi Bike, New York City’s bike-share system, since it launched late last May. More than 100,000 people hold annual memberships. Yet financially, Citi Bike needs help. According to the New York Times, Citi Bike is seeking somewhere in the range of $20 million to be able to maintain and expand the program. As the city’s transportation commissioner, Polly Trottenberg, has admitted, Citi Bike has faced “significant financial and operational issues.”

The company’s financial turmoil may be due, in part, to the structure of its main sponsorship with Citi Bank. The New York City Department of Transportation provides oversight for Citi Bike, but the program--which is the largest in the country--receives no public money, differentiating it from bike shares in other cities. The New York system is operated by NYC Bike Share, a subsidiary of the Portland-based Alta Bike Share, which also operates systems in Chicago, Boston, and Washington, D.C., among others. In a deal brokered by the Bloomberg administration, Citigroup is paying $41 million over the bike share’s first five years to be the title sponsor.

Mastercard, the only other sponsor, paid $6.5 million.

The problem is that it can be hard to decipher where Citi Bike ends and Citibank begins, making it difficult to entice additional sponsors to join. When you allow one company to brand your service so completely, there’s little benefit left to offer other potential funding partners. According to the Wall Street Journal: Alta was always expected to seek sponsorship, in addition to Citigroup Inc., which paid for the naming rights. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. lent the money up front to pay for start-up costs. Finding additional sponsors has proved challenging because the program has become so closely associated with its eponymous supporter, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Citi made a smart investment by inextricably linking itself with the popular bike share for a mere $41 million. Thousands of New Yorkers are riding moving Citi billboards around the city each day. For the bike share, the benefits of the partnership are less clear. By not securing enough Citi money to keep itself afloat from the outset without other sponsors, Citi Bike may have hobbled itself.

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12 Scott Galloway, a marketing professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, tells Co.Design that it’s not shocking that Citi Bike would have difficulties finding additional sponsorship. “When the first member on your team is A-Rod, it doesn’t leave a lot of opportunity or budget to other players,” he says. “When your first sponsor is Citi and it’s called Citi Bike, there’s not a lot of value for other advertisers. They should have known upfront they were selling one sponsorship, and should have planned accordingly.” (According to Bloomberg Businessweek, Bloomberg administration officials initially asked Citigroup for more, but were negotiated down.)

WHEN YOUR FIRST SPONSOR IS CITI AND IT’S CALLED CITI BIKE, THERE’S NOT A LOT OF VALUE FOR OTHER ADVERTISERS. Citi has branded the bike-sharing service in New York so fantastically that trying to separate the bikes from their sponsor can be confusing. “It’s the visual and the verbal,” explains Kevin Lane Keller, a marketing professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. First, Citi Bike and Citibank sound so similar that in announcing the partnership, then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg got them mixed up.

Then there’s the physical branding: In addition to the Citi logo, the bike-share network is plastered with the bank’s distinct shade of cobalt blue (a hue screenwriter Delia Ephron decried as having “distorted every view” in the city). website looks just similar enough to Citi the bank’s actual site (again, that blue!), to make me briefly question whether I was looking at a Citi-owned product. I’m not the only one who gets confused. Vandals have smashed Citi Bike docking stations in protest of Citigroup. Some “people don’t realize that Citi is just a sponsor and it’s Alta that operates all of this,” Keller says. “They assume this is all Citi’s.”

That confusion is compounded here: When asked about Citi Bike’s difficulties finding other sponsors, a media representative from NYC Bike Share directed all queries to Citi’s director of public affairs (who as of publication time has not provided a response.)

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Of course, becoming the primary sponsor for an unproven bike-sharing system was a risk on Citigroup’s part. Had the bike share been wildly loathed, the company would have been entwined with the controversy. “The meanings of Citi the brand are now forever connected to this bike thing, for five years,” says Susan Fournier, a professor of marketing at the Boston University School of Management. “In the evolutionary plane of this [Citi Bike] brand, five years is going to be a long time.” These first few years are when people’s perceptions of the bike share are being formed.

Some branding opportunities are, by nature, parties of one, like naming rights to a stadium. You can’t call a baseball stadium US Cellular/Staples Field. By not branding the system with a lead sponsor’s name, other bike-share programs, like D.C.’s Capitol Bike Share, have left themselves open to dozens of sponsors, like their station sponsorship program, for example, that nets $18,000 per 19-dock station. In Citi Bike’s case, “there’ll be other ancillary opportunities, but everything is going to play second fiddle to Citi,” Galloway says.

So far, connection with the popular service has been good for Citi. Celebrities Citi Bike. Brides Citi Bike. In a recent interview with Advertising Age magazine, Citibank marketing executive Elyssa Gray said the bike-share sponsorship has netted $4.4 million dollars in earned media (free advertising, largely from social media).

Meanwhile, Citi Bike’s own earned revenue isn’t what the bike-share organizers had hoped. Part of the blame for Citi Bike’s financial woes has been placed on its lack of popularity with casual riders. The bike share has so far attracted far more annual riders, who pay only $95 a year for unlimited rides up to 45 minutes, compared to daily passers, who pay $9.95 for 24-hours of unlimited 30 minute trips. The bike share has also faced other unforeseen challenges: damage to bikes by Hurricane Sandy, an especially rough first winter, and the bankruptcy of Bixi, the company providing the bike share’s technology.

If Citi Bike hopes to bring in new sponsors to make up for its budget gaps, it’ll have to figure out a way to provide some sort of value for them, whether that’s giving them a portion of signage on the bikes or stations or something else entirely.

It’ll certainly be a tough sell. Citi Bike frames may be clunky, but they’re not quite big enough to support more than the five Citi logos already embedded in the Citi Bike frame.

Shaunacy Ferro is a Brooklyn-based writer covering architecture, urban design and the sciences.

5 MYTHS ABOUT WORKING WITH BIG BRANDS While big-name corporations may walk tall and talk big, not everything you believe about them is true.

Lisa Hu

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From my days at the management consulting firm Accenture, where I typically worked with the same client on the same project for months, to my current role at the mobile platform Blippar, where I work with many different brands, I’ve been fortunate enough to observe the ins and outs of both the corporate and startup worlds.

While it’s obvious to outsiders that the processes at large corporations are much different than the typical culture at startups, I’ve found that you can’t assume the standard practices and protocols will always apply. In fact, you might be surprised to learn that not everything you’ve believed about corporations is true. Here are five myths that startups should be aware of--and work to overcome--when collaborating with the big guys.

MYTH #1: STUNNING POWERPOINT PRESENTATIONS ARE REQUIRED TO WOW THE BRAND AND RECEIVE BUY-IN FOR MY OFFERING. Reality: There’s some truth to this, as there are corporations that embrace PowerPoint gurus who spend weeks creating detailed iterations of a deck that tells the value proposition story from beginning to end. I know this from experience, as I once clocked in 63 versions of a 76-slide deck when helping one corporate strategy team years ago.

However, PowerPoints can only get you so far, and the value of slick graphics and process flow diagrams is deteriorating.

Amazon is one company that realized this early on, and I recall a ban on PowerPoints for any presentation during my internship there; a Word document (no longer than five pages) was required instead.

Change is a good thing, and I’ve often found that corporations react positively to a presentation that’s different from the norm. I’ve been known to bring in a Wheaties box and simply demo our app right off the package to show our clients how we can help them. By taking the road less traveled, you’ll create something memorable that stands out from the rest.

MYTH #2: ONLY THE BRAND’S INTERNAL TEAM MEMBERS OR STAKEHOLDERS MATTER WHEN CREATING NEW INITIATIVES. Reality: First, while you do need to invest in certain internal teams and stakeholders, it’s very common for large corporations to reorganize and shift personnel around--so your main brand contact one day may suddenly move to another division or firm tomorrow.

More importantly, you need to invest your time with the brand’s advertising agencies end-to-end. In my experience, agencies (and this includes media-buy, execution, and digital, among other types) have always been vital to the successful execution of our campaigns, and the result would not have been the same without them. These external players also often have significant influence and can impact the brand’s decisions and budgets, so it’s important for startups to embrace them and work well with them at all times.

And by working well, it’s about quickly building a genuine

and easy relationship. Startups must make an effort to understand how agencies operate and what their objectives are for their clients, and then work with them every step of the way. Don’t just fire off an email with ten bullet points and assume that’s enough information; instead, take the time to walk them through the steps so they don’t have to puzzle it out on their own. Remember: they’ve been hired to do a job as well, and it’s up to you as the vendor to help make their day-to-day even easier.

MYTH #3: ALL BRAND WORK WILL BE DONE IN-HOUSE BY ONE PARTY. Reality: Corporations often have extended families comprised not only of the aforementioned agencies, but also consulting firms, data providers, and other third parties, all of whom execute activities--many of them simultaneously. One of our recent executions for a large CPG brand involved my team liaising with three agencies, another third-party vendor, and a data specialist. As a startup working with a brand, you must be prepared to engage with many different groups at any given time.

MYTH #4: ALL INTERNAL TEAMS WITHIN THE BRAND LIAISE WITH EACH OTHER REGULARLY. Reality: Don’t be surprised if different departments and teams within the same major company aren’t interfacing with each other, even if it’s within the same product line. As the gobetween, keep in mind you that you might be introducing co-workers to each other for the first time, and it might be more awkward if you assume they are aligned. During one of my client assignments at Accenture, all of the consultants were assigned to different operating groups under that client, and we soon realized that our corporate contacts didn’t know each other. We immediately organized happy hours and introduced people to each other so that they could share their knowledge and launch new collaborations. As an outsider, you can be the link that many of these larger companies need.

MYTH #5: ONCE A PROJECT IS APPROVED, IT’S 100% APPROVED. Reality: Don’t think for a second that just because one person signed off, everything else will fall into place. I’ve found that multiple stakeholders often need to obtain signoff, in addition to a detailed review by the legal team, before a contract receives the green light. And the truth is that corporations might suddenly shift priorities, have budgets pulled, or need to cut any innovation-based initiatives at a moment’s notice, as they may feel pressure from their Wall Street shareholders to immediately change up internal strategies.

Even though you and your startup have invested a large amount of time and energy into the partnership, don’t be bitter if it falls through--see it as a way to recalibrate. New opportunities may arise down the road, and you want the brand to remember your positive outlook and flexibility.

Lisa Hu is U.S. VP and General Manager at Blippar.

5 Tips for Getting Consumers Comfortable Sharing Data BETWEEN NEWS OF NSA SPYING AND TARGET HACKING, PEOPLE ARE WARIER THAN EVER ABOUT SHARING THEIR PERSONAL INFO. THEODORE FORBATH OF FROG OFFERS FIVE TIPS FOR BUILDING CONSUMERS’ TRUST. Theodore Forbath Personally, I’m having trouble giving it up. By “it,” I mean information about me, details that I’ve worked hard to safeguard and keep private. In fact, the same companies that are now soliciting, or simply taking, my personal data still encourage me to create strong user IDs and passwords to

I’VE SEEN HOW RELINQUISHING SOME OF MY AUTONOMY CAN BE A GOOD THING.

protect my privacy. This can sometimes feel like a conflicting message to the consumer.

After working in the product strategy, design, and development industries for nearly 25 years, I’ve seen how relinquishing some of my autonomy can be a good thing.

Through smartphones, tablets, watches, Google Glasses, and Fitbits, companies are using my personal data to help me in ways that feel comforting instead of unnerving.

Here are five tips for brand leaders to consider when harvesting personal data so consumers feel okay about giving it up.

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LISTEN TO YOUR CONSUMERS Successful dental visits and successful data withdrawal have one thing in common--when performed by experts, they can be pain-free and both parties benefit from the experience.

Building trust takes time and lending an ear is critical. Listening and responding are two important activities a company can undertake to ensure brand loyalty. And the best brands know this. They nurture their consumers and in return, they earn devotion. Consumers will embrace new products and new terms, including unloading personal information, if they feel a company, their company, cares about them.

Disney is a good example of this. Through MyMagic+, a new vacation management system, Disney is starting to track valuable residual information from the 121.4 million consumers who visit its Orlando theme parks. Wearing MagicBand bracelets embedded with RFID chips, consumers relay data about where they are and what they are buying.

The result? Targeted marketing and ideally a better visitor experience. Kids could be personally greeted by Mickey or parents could receive alerts about the shortest line for rides.

BE TRANSPARENT ABOUT DATA USAGE In any relationship, shady maneuvers raise eyebrows and suspicion. Trust and mutual respect come through upfront messaging and sincere dialogues between a brand and their users. A company has to be honest about how it is collecting data and how that data will be used. The manner or tone in which this transparency is established will be crucial to consumers’ willingness to comply. Take the money-tracking website Mint.com. When asked about relinquishing private information, Mint clients acknowledged comfort in sharing their financial profile and monthly transactions because of the expert advice on lower bank fees and interest rates the company provides. This reciprocal, show-all nature of their relationship with the brand makes Mint a mint.

OFFER ELECTIVE DATA SHARING Consumers want to know they can opt in or out of information sharing. Again, as with any functional relationship, trust is built over time. Details about individual consumers’ buying habits, trending patterns, and cost-value perspectives will be parsed out if a company is patient, reassuring customers that their data is being curated by a brand that treats personal data with personal attention.

But companies should also remember that not all information is created equal. Consumers give away low-value data like contact information while protecting high-value or “expensive” data like social security numbers. It can be the middle-ground data, information gleaned from the digital detritus of modern life, like chat logs, emails, texts, tweets, Facebook, and Instagram posts, as well as web browsing history, that make consumers uneasy. This Big Brother behavior must be managed to avoid the collision of privacy concerns and big data strategies. Sports fanatics are happy to share their contact information and the names of their favorite teams so that ESPN can email or text real-time updates on sports scores as well as any other breaking news

CONSUMERS WANT TO KNOW THEY CAN OPT IN OR OUT OF INFORMATION SHARING.

about players and rival teams. The gray area for company comes when it begins to send incentives such as discounted tickets to a favorite team’s next game; would consumers deem this an ad or valuable, even beneficial, content?

OFFER CONSUMER BENEFITS If a company provides services or information, which are perceived as valuable, consumers will return the favor by giving up personal data. We’ve done research at frog that suggests consumers are game to reveal all, or at least some, if the relationship is a two-way street. For EyeLock, frog helped to design a biometric identification system called Myris that uses the 240 unique characteristics of our irises to eventually allow consumers to unlock cars, computers, and homes. Early adopters are comfortable giving up their highly personalized, idiosyncratic data for the high level of security and authentication that they receive in exchange.

USE CONTEXTUAL AWARENESS CONSTRUCTIVELY There’s a fine-line between harvesting personal data to assist or to exploit. By enhancing the consumer experience, a company will earn lifelong loyalty. If, on the other hand, information management is handled poorly, a consumer will angrily flee and Yelp about it for days on end. GoogeNow, a great example of a new class of assistive apps that integrates personal information, such as flight departure times from a user’s calendar with ones’ current location and real-time traffic data, is the frequent-traveler’s new best friend as it can alert a user to the optimal time to leave for the airport.

Based on one’s physical location and schedule, GoogleNow provides contextually specific advice.

THERE’S A FINE-LINE HARVESTING PERSONAL ASSIST OR TO EXPLOIT.

BETWEEN DATA TO

Another company who is capitalizing on the rewards of contextual awareness is U.K.’s Wonga. By using one’s Facebook credentials to login to its quick loan online service, Wonga is able to quickly authenticate an applicant by the number of connections that they have in their social graph. For Wonga, a large number of social connections is equivalent to a physical address or e-mail account in verifying someone’s identity.

Based on our work designing products and services for Fortune 100 companies in the interconnected world, we at frog know that personal data collection, coupled with effective strategies to manage customers’ privacy concerns, will distinguish best-in-class products and enduring brands from their competitors. This effort will take patience and nurturing just as any healthy relationship does. Companies must actively engage with their customers to establish a dialogue of mutual understanding on how personal data is captured, stored, managed, analyzed, re-used, and shared over time. In the end, customers will see the tangible benefits of sharing private information with companies who have invested in knowing them in order to create much more personalized user experiences.

Theodore Forbath is global vice president in charge of innovation strategy at frog, the product strategy and design firm.

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Simon Robinson is senior director of marketing and alliances EMEA at Responsys

A Playful New Brand Identity For Ikea

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A STUDENT DESIGNER PROPOSES REPLACING IKEA’S DATED LOGO WITH SOMETHING FRESH AND LIVELY. Margaret Rhodes Ikea’s traditional blue and yellow logo was designed as a nod to the company’s Swedish heritage. It’s easy to recognize and can be seen from a distance, as you drive up to the warehouse-sized store. Other than that, the logo is pretty bland.

Ikea’s merchandise, however, has many characteristics: It’s minimalist, affordable, space-friendly, and has tonguetwisting Swedish product names. Its graphic identity just doesn’t really speak to any of them. “It’s instantly recognizable as being a Swedish institution, but does it suit Ikea as a company in 2014?” asks student designer Joe Ling. “I don’t think so.”

Ling decided to do some course correcting, in a project for a class at the Norwich University of the Arts, in the United Kingdom. The class was asked to choose from a list of companies that included, in addition to Ikea, Bang & Olufsen, and toy maker Meccano. Ling’s take: Not only does the Ikea logo look dated, but it doesn’t articulate what Ikea does best, which is to sell playful, flat-packed furniture.

“I remember as a child going to Ikea with my family and running up and down the seemingly never-ending aisles of cardboard boxes filled with flat packaged furniture,” he tells Co.Design. “I thought the most recognizable way to represent Ikea would be if the branding itself had an element of construction.”

Ling’s logo is a 3-D outline of the Ikea letters, stacked unevenly.

The lines evoke the sketches of chair legs and tabletops found in Ikea’s instruction manuals, and they appear to be mid-

motion, like a freeze-frame of a Schoolhouse Rock animation.

The theme of construction is sometimes more conceptual than it is illustrated: Employee tags, worn on lanyards, must be joined together, in a group of four, to create the entire logo. For the instruction manuals, Ling included a sleeve that has to come off. “The identity is very much designed to be constructed by the person interacting with it, exactly like Ikea furniture,” Ling says.

Graphic redesigns don’t come easy. In 2009, Ikea accosted type nerds everywhere when they swapped out the heritagerich Futura font in their catalogs with the more generic Verdana typeface. Because Futura was created by a German designer in 1920, and Verdana was designed later, for computers, the move signaled to many a philosophical shift away from original design.

But this newer proposal also prompts the question: If Ling’s redesign took hold, would it make consumers think more about the manual labor that lies ahead, and less about Ikea’s design point of view? “A brand’s identity has to communicate exactly what that business does. If it doesn’t do that, it falls at the first hurdle,” Ling says about his project. Indeed, the implications of shopping at Ikea are hardly a secret by now. For many, it’s one of the benefits, because flat-packed furniture is more efficient, and is part and parcel with Ikea’s success in opening stores in more than 40 countries, and working with young designers from around the world.

And if that kills your shopping aspirations, there’s always Taskrabbit.

Margaret Rhodes is an associate editor for Fast Company magazine, where she produces Wanted and covers product design.

WHAT YOUR LOGO’S COLOR SAYS ABOUT YOUR COMPANY (INFOGRAPHIC) Understanding the science behind color could increase the effectiveness of your company’s branding methods.

Rachel Gillett When it comes to identifying your brand, your logo is probably the first thing your customers will think of.

While honing the narrative and message behind your logo should of course be your primary concern, research suggests that your logo’s design--and specifically its colors--have more bearing on your customers’ opinions than you might think.

Neuroscientist Bevil Conway, who has focused his recent research almost entirely on the neural machinery behind color, believes the science behind color processing to be very powerful and completely underexploited.

“Knowing that humans might ... be hardwired for certain hues could be a gateway into understanding the neural properties of emotion,” he told Co.Design earlier this month.

The implications of color’s effect on people’s emotions are far reaching, and understanding your customers’ connections to certain colors could increase the effectiveness of your company’s branding methods.

According to research complied by web design and marketing company WebPageFX, people make a subconscious judgment about a product in less than 90 seconds of viewing, and a majority of these people base that assessment on color alone. In fact, almost 85% of consumers cite color as the primary reason they buy a particular product, and 80% of people believe color increases brand recognition.

Take a look at WebPageFX’s infographic about the psychology of color to see what each color says to your customers:

Red

is often associated with the heat of sun and fire and is considered a high-arousal color, often stimulating people to take risks, according to color think tank, Pantone. It has also been shown to stimulate the senses and raise blood pressure, and it may arouse feelings of power, energy, passion, love, aggression, or danger.

Yellow Blue

is often associated with the heat of sun and fire and is considered a high-arousal color. It may stimulate feelings of optimism and hope or cowardice and betrayal.

is often associated with the coolness of the sea and sky. It has been shown to calm the senses and lower blood pressure. It may stimulate feelings of trust, security, order, and cleanliness.

Green

is often associated with the coolness of leaves. People often associate it with nature, health, good luck, and jealousy.

Orange Purple

is often associated with the heat of sun and fire and is considered a high-arousal color. It may stimulate feelings of energy, balance, and warmth.

is generally considered a low-arousal color. It may stimulate feelings of spirituality, mystery, royalty, or arrogance.

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Rachel Gillett is a multimedia journalist and editorial assistant for FastCompany.com’s Leadership section.

Her work has been featured on PopPhoto.com, AOL. com, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Jersey City and enjoys contributing to the vibrant arts and crafting scene there.

How big data and personalisation will make the future of brand communications

U-shaped Guy Norwell

As brands and brand marketers look to gain an edge on each other by engendering a meaningful, two-way dialogue with consumers, there can be no doubt that mass digitalisation, big data and personalisation are drivers for significant change.

Brand marketers are striving to innovate at any available opportunity leading to a scenario where data scientists are desperately extracting insights and channelling them into mass market, personalised digital communications.

consumer market. What we are left with is a simplified landscape in which streaming content dominates, but an ongoing love affair with vinyl still remains.

The film industry: The film industry has followed a similar path to the music industry, as consumers look to the internet to stream content.

However, even in this digital age there is still a burgeoning desire for cinema and boutique experiences nationwide.

The publishing industry: In publishing, there is currently a 24% year-on-year increase in ebooks and digital publishing, but equally and somewhat surprisingly there is an increase in the launches of hard-copy luxury newsstand publications.

With this in mind, it is essential for marketers to spot the impact of digitalisation on the landscape of brand communications and set a long-term strategy for its implementation. With big data still in its relative infancy and personalisation often interpreted as a crude method of marketing, inspiration can be drawn from other industries where the mass adoption of digital has had a polarising effect.

Broadly the trend is this: any industry, having been through the ‘digital overhaul’ is left in a U-shape; an explosion in digital media for the mass-market on one side, but a strong resurgence in luxury ‘tangibles’ for niche markets on the other. All other formats and channels in between have started to fall away.

The music industry: We have moved away from a situation circa 15 years ago where a gamut of devices, recording formats, companies and distribution channels were fighting it out in the mass

Taking all this in to account it’s not a massive leap to assume that the combined effect of big data, digitisation and increased personalisation will have the same effect on brand communications. A U-shaped curve result where marketers will focus on ever-more sophisticated personalisation in digital channels (e.g. dynamically optimised messaging and retargeting) on the one hand, but compliment this through high quality printed or personalised ‘tangible’ media or gifts on the other.

A couple of examples reflect this trend. British Airways, who’s recent campaign targeted travellers with window images that made consumers feel as if they were on the plane was a small touch to show consumers ‘this brand understands me and is anticipating my real needs now’. In contrast, there will always be the need for campaigns such as American Express, who hand deliver their new Centurion card members a beautiful box engraved with the members name on the outside and fully personalised welcome literature on the inside.

And so, whilst digital personalisation is here to stay, it will serve marketers well to remember that at the end of the day, as well as remembering our name, we all like to get something beautiful to hold in our hands.

Guy Norwell is business development director, EMEA at RedWorks

Why the Future of Digital Marketing Is Pure PR

Gerald Heneghan

Industry commentators have been keen to sound the death knell for traditional SEO in the wake of recent updates (and full-on algorithm switch-outs) from Google.

It’s arguable that they have good grounds to make such dramatic claims. In its never-ending battle to have its search spiders behave more like humans, the big G has increasingly moved away from rewarding those who tick the boxes on technical elements and has instead placed a growing emphasis on social signals and quality content.

However, I’m of the opinion that although SEO is here to stay, its evolution will lean toward the more traditional practice of public relations (PR) in the coming years. In this article I’ll try to…

• Back up this claim by looking at industry statistics • Put forward a case as to why PR can be highly complementary to SEO • And, above all, offer some suggestions about how marketers can capitalize on this trend

Facts and Figures As I noted, Google wants its robots to behave more like a human when displaying search results. Accordingly, the general consensus among the experts is that more weight is being placed on factors such as inbound links and Google +1s. The way that personalized results are being rolled out to more and more users, and the introduction of Authorship, are further indications of that trend.

Similarly, the changes are aptly summed up in the search giant’s recently revised guidance on how webmasters can improve the ranking of their websites: “In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by creating high-quality sites that users will want to use and share.”

And that’s exactly where PR excels. Once you have the technical elements down, the focus switches to consistently producing valuable, shareable content that appeals to your key audiences—a task that traditional PR agencies have reams of experience in.

But don’t just take my word for it. In the UK at least, marketers

are plunging more and more resources into bolstering the online profile of their brands via PR. For instance: The Public Relations Consultants Association recently found that 72% of PR agencies are now offering SEO services.

The most in-demand services were content creation, outreaching/engaging with influencers, and social networking strategy.

More than 60% of agencies have increased their digital marketing budgets, with a particular focus on monitoring, SEO, content creation, and PPC/online advertising.

Compared with 12 months earlier, agency revenues from digital sources have increased significantly.

Businesses in Britain are increasingly devoting resources to social media; though most of them are keeping this activity in-house, a significant portion are splitting responsibility for social with an agency or completely outsourcing altogether.

In the vast majority of cases, responsibility for content creation and social media is handled in-house by the PR and communications team.

There’s also growing confidence in the ROI gained from social media, with levels nearly matching those of traditional PR activities.

Why PR? One oft-quoted anecdote about the difference between marketing and PR goes something like this: “You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and say: ‘I am very rich. Marry me!’ That’s direct marketing.

“You’re at a party with a bunch of friends and see a gorgeous girl. One of your friends goes up to her and pointing at you says: ‘He’s very rich. Marry him.’ That’s advertising.

“You’re at a party and see gorgeous girl. You get up and straighten your tie, you walk up to her and pour her a drink, you open the door (of the car) for her, pick up her bag after she drops it, offer her ride, and then say: ‘By the way, I’m rich. Will you Marry Me?’ That’s public relations.”

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28 As this unwieldy metaphor demonstrates, “traditional” PR activities are all about emphasizing the interesting aspects of a business and crafting a profile that positions it as a trusted authority in its field and engenders both recognition and trust among target audiences.

Unlike an agency or in-house team focused exclusively on search, social, advertising, or marketing, PR can encompass all of those disciplines, taking a holistic view of a brand’s profile and crafting a multichannel campaign designed to positively influence.

Creating content people want to use and share is a given with PR. Activities such as media relations, events, crafting corporate communications, and even drafting press releases with a view to attracting as much media coverage as possible stand as analog versions of modern digital tactics such as blogger outreach, guest posts, and social media networking.

events, industry conferences, and speaking opportunities should be your bread and butter approach to raising your profile within your community, as well as helping you look like you’ve got your finger on the pulse of your sector.

On the flip side, if you’ve already secured a guest spot in a relevant print, TV, radio editorial, or speaking event—be sure to capitalize on it via your online assets.

2. Bolster your media relations PR has long been about quality over quantity. Agencies and individuals are often hired and fired based on their reach within relevant press circles. Digital marketers should attempt to emulate PR practices with a view to building long-term relationships with offline and online publications, bloggers, and journalists that can provide valuable sources of coverage time and again.

Traditional PR activities map extremely well to digital marketing activities, giving a brand or business something to talk about on the Web and the means to attract coverage in offline as well as online publications.

However, don’t succumb to the temptation to revert to the fire-and-forget methods of days gone by... and so abuse these relationships. Get to know the assets in question, what they’ll be interested in, and what they avoid like the plague.

In short, be useful to them, and they’ll reciprocate in spades.

Link-Building and Press Releases

3. Make the most of your content

Google now frowns on aggressive linkbuilding or widespread guest posting campaigns that intend to manipulate page rank.

By using your site as a hub for quality content relevant to your industry and offering insightful comment on pressing issues, you have the potential to attract social shares, online coverage, and guest-posting opportunities on relevant sites (which will generate more of those precious inbound links).

Fortunately, the time-old media relations tactics employed

by PR agencies in generating coverage translate fantastically into the digital arena. Those methods allow companies to earn high-quality coverage from reputable, relevant news sites—many of which happen to have great domain authority and other favorable linkbuilding qualities—enabling sites to ethically gain inbound links while simultaneously bolstering their profile.

Google’s updated advice on linkbuilding was forecast to cause something of an uproar in the PR world in regard to press releases and other types of promotional content posted across multiple sites and stuffed with links.

Despite the hyperbole, the death of PR agencies never really materialized. Online press release directories and sites willing to host such content are undoubtedly valuable resources, but if your agency’s strategy to attract coverage is to fire these out en-masse, without much thought towards targeting, it’s safe to say they’re doing it wrong.

Cashing In So now that we’ve established just what PR can bring to the digital marketing table, what are the best ways for marketers to put the methodology of public relations to use in the online arena?

1. Offline and online activity complement each other Content creation is one of the key struggles for businesses branching out into the world of digital. However, by ensuring that offline and online activities complement one another brands can ensure they have plenty to talk about via both channels.

Live-tweeting and sharing goings-on from relevant networking

But the fun doesn’t stop there. Promoting your quality onsite content can get you noticed by the people who matter, leading to the possibility of print coverage and participation in real-world interviews, editorials, and events—not to mention the prospect of new business from parties you’ve attracted through blogs, whitepapers, videos, and the like.

PR itself can also have a direct impact on traffic to your site. HubSpot’s Lindsey Kirchoff claims that the company always sees a spike in branded traffic following a concerted campaign. So, in addition to promoting your events online, make sure you’re trumpeting your online presence when engaging in real-world activities.

4. Join relevant industry communities and discussions And if they don’t exist yet, get them started. Platforms such as LinkedIn and Google+ are among the best tools for finding and developing relevant communities; they also offer you a chance to showcase your expertise to those looking for advice or guidance.

The Bottom Line PR is in no way a silver bullet for your SEO woes, or your lack of social media profiles. As with any sustained marketing effort it takes hard work, collaboration, and regular review to realize a successful PR campaign.

However, savvy digital marketers who use the methodologies of public relations in a sustained and strategic manner across the board can reap a potential world of benefits.

Gerald Heneghan is head of content at Roland Dransfield PR, based in Manchester, UK. He combines a background in journalism with Internet savvy and a genuine passion for technology and search.

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The Complete A to Z Guide to Personal Branding Seth Price Ever since Tom Peters laid out a modern “personal branding” road map in Fast Company in the late 1990s, the concept has been in full swing. The revelation was that we could be an individual powerhouse, separate from the corporate umbrella.

So much has happened since: blogging, social media, the advent of online video, and the explosion of content marketing.

Nevertheless, nearly two decades later, most companies require a strict separation of business communication and personal branding, with the job of social interaction relegated to a few chosen spokespeople or PR handlers.

Meanwhile, those brands are missing out on the collective connections and expertise of the very people they’ve hired to be a crucial part of their team. But all that is about to change. Those who fail to embrace the empowered individual brand will miss out on the positive impact that employee advocacy has to offer.

Like most marketers, I spend a lot of time trying to do more with less. Lately, though, I’ve become more aware that I’m surrounded by a team of super-smart professionals who were recruited and hired because they can add value to our startup. This realization got me thinking about what it means to empower the individual brand in concert with a company mission.

I found lots of great examples, such as IBM; its 300,000 employees are encouraged to share and publish online, and MarketingProfs, where individual subject-matter experts are invited to share with and teach an audience they may not have been able to reach without the power of the community. That is what building a brand is all about: mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their members.

To explore this topic further, I recently collaborated with online powerhouse and fellow MarketingProfs contributor Barry Feldman of Feldman Creative to create “The Complete A to Z Guide to Personal Branding” (see the infographic, below)—to help people and companies dive into the wonderful world of personal branding.

If you haven’t incorporated personal branding into your marketing strategy by now, you’re missing out on a world of value that your team is more than willing to contribute.

Seth Price is VP of Sales and Marketing at Placester, a platform for marketing real estate online. He’s consulted with Metlife, BMW, Sony, Nationwide Financial, AAI Foster Grant, and Toys “R” Us to help them better engage customers online.

How Cereal Boxes Are Designed To Hypnotize You A NEW STUDY FINDS CARTOON MASCOTS ARE ALWAYS DESIGNED TO MAKE LOVE TO YOUR EYES. CAP’N CRUNCH? MORE LIKE SVENGALI. John Brownlee

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34 Next time you wander down the cereal aisle with your shopping cart, ask yourself this: Why on Earth are all the cartoon mascots--Fred Flintstone, Cap’n Crunch, the Trix Rabbit, and so on--staring directly at your crotch?

As it turns out, there’s a reason for that. Cereal boxes aimed at children are specifically designed so that the eyes of the mascots look downward, making direct eye contact with the sugar goblins that they are hoping to seduce.

In a study of over 65 cereals and 86 mascots across 10 different grocery stores in New York and Connecticut, Cornell’s Food and Brand Lab studied the characters on the front of cereal boxes. What they found is that all characters and people on cereal boxes --whether Lucky the Leprechaun, or Michael Jordan on a box of Wheaties--are designed to make eye contact with the intended consumer. In fact, they have almost exactly the same focal point: they are staring out from the box at a spot about four feet away, which is the average distance from the shelf of a customer walking down a supermarket aisle.

That makes sense. Cereal makers aren’t throwing mascots on their boxes for fun. It’s to create a psychological connection between a shopper and that box of dehydrated fruits and wheat flakes. But in the case of children’s cereals, this fourfoot stare is actually aimed at a much lower focal point.

Cornell’s researchers found that the eyes of spokescharacters

on cereal boxes marketed to kids were aimed downward at a 9.6 degree angle; characters on adult boxes tended, on the other hand, to look straight ahead.

CHARACTERS ON CEREAL BOXES MARKETED TO KIDS WERE AIMED DOWNWARD AT A 9.6 DEGREE ANGLE. In conjunction with the way that cereal boxes tend to be placed on store shelves, with adult cereals on top shelves and the more marshmallow-laden sugar puffs lower, the result is that the mascots of kid cereals are always trying to make eye contact with kids, while adult cereal mascots are trying to catch the eye of grown-ups. Whether you’re a kid or an adult, the experience of walking down a cereal aisle is like running a gauntlet of unblinking corporate mascots, all trying to stare at you so hard that they bore their brand into your mind.

And it works. According to Cornell’s research, brand trust was 16% higher and brand connectivity was 28% higher when, say, the Honey Smack Frog looked you square in the eye, as opposed to, say, looked at something else on the box.

Our minds are pre-programmed to trust people who look us in the eye, and that seems to be just as true of maniacally leering cartoon sugar peddlers as it is a person on the street.

John Brownlee is a writer who lives in Boston with two irate parakeets and a fiancée of more exquisite plumage. His work has appeared at Wired, Playboy, PopMech, Cult Of Mac, Boing Boing, and Gizmodo.

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Crucial Lessons From History’s Greatest Graphic Designers

SIMPLIFY, VISUALIZE, KNOW YOUR USER: THE LESSONS OF THESE DESIGN PIONEERS, FROM EL LISSITZKY TO PAULA SCHER, ARE AS RELEVANT AS EVER. John Clifford Many people know the names of influential architects, artists, and fashion designers; far fewer know the names of graphic designers. It’s strange to me, since graphic designers create so much of our everyday world. And it’s not only civilians with a general interest in design who lack that knowledge. I have also encountered many design professionals and students who don’t know Herbert Bayer from Herbert Matter. I wanted to change that.

I wrote Graphic Icons: Visionaries Who Shaped Modern Graphic Design to highlight pioneers of graphic design, from El Lissitzky to Paula Scher. In the course of researching the book, I came to realize that each of these figures offers key lessons for today’s designers. Early 20th-century German designer Lucian Bernhard favored a flat minimalism that echoes the pared-down design popular in many contemporary user interfaces. Swiss designer Joseph Müller-Brockmann embraced and mastered the use of the grid, an important part of modern web design. Here’s a look at how can we take inspiration from these figures--not by copying their style, but by creating something new that is informed by their pioneering spirits.

DON’T MAKE THE WORLD MORE HIGHTECH, MAKE IT MORE HUMANE.

LUCIAN BERNHARD: SIMPLIFY Lucian Bernhard was in his early twenties in 1905 when he entered his design in an advertising poster contest sponsored by Priester matches. Although Art Nouveau was popular at the time, with its complex ornaments and floral embellishments, Bernhard took a different creative direction, painting a simple scene showing a smoking cigar in an ashtray with matches. A friend saw the artwork and thought it advertised cigars. So Bernhard reduced all unnecessary detail until all that remained was a pair of red matches. He then painted the brand name. There was no slogan, nothing to distract from the visual of the product and its name.

Not only did Bernhard’s design win the contest, it launched a new, straightforward style of advertising that he continued for clients such as Excelsior Tires and Adler Typewriters.

German companies in particular embraced this new flat minimalism, which they called Sachplakat (object poster, which led to the broader Plakatstil, or poster style--advertisers felt that Art Nouveau’s intricate decoration could obscure or compete with their product.

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EL LISSITZKY: COMMUNICATE WITHOUT WORDS In 1921, Russian designer El Lissitzky was among a group of artists who broke away from Kasimir Malevich’s Suprematists--who believed art need not serve any function beyond its intrinsic, spiritual value--to focus on practical design to aid Russia’s new communist state.

These were the Constructivists.

Lissitzky, whose work had several distinguishing characteristics--layouts structured on a grid, limited color palettes, tense diagonals, sans serif type, and repetition of pure geometric forms, believed that art and design could communicate in a nation where much of the population was illiterate. He aimed to establish a visual language using shape and color instead of letterforms; in his famous political poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, geometric shapes tell the story of the revolutionaries shattering the establishment.

LADISLAV SUTNAR: UNDERSTAND YOUR USER Czech-born Ladislav Sutnar collaborated with writer Knud Lönberg-Holm to improve Sweet’s Catalog Service, which compiled the catalogs of different manufacturers in the construction industry. Recognizing that people look for products in different ways, they developed a system that crossreferenced each item by company, trade, and product name. Sutnar clarified the vast amount of information, using colors, shapes, charts, and graphic symbols to guide the reader. He established hierarchy by emphasizing type--changing scale and weight, reversing out of color, and using italics and parentheses--which made skimming, reading, and remembering easier. (He also established the standard protocol of putting phone number area codes in parentheses.)

Sutnar was moving beyond the single page and embracing the double-page spread, creating designs that weren’t just visually interesting, but also helpful.

The way he steered readers through complex information sounds much like what we now call information design or information architecture, which has been further developed by Edward Tufte and Richard Saul Wurman, as well as by digital and web designers everywhere.

ALVIN LUSTIG: SUGGEST, DON’T EXPLAIN Although Alvin Lustig designed magazines, interiors, packaging, fabrics, hotels, mall signage, the opening credits of the cartoon Mr. Magoo--even a helicopter--he is best known for his book covers. New Directions publisher James Laughlin had been packaging reprints of modern literary titles in a pretty traditional format, and they weren’t selling. Lustig came on board and gave the books new life with bright colors and abstract visuals that echoed the art of Joan Miró and Paul Klee. Rather than showing an image that explicitly represented the story, Lustig read the work and created symbolic visuals that interpreted the book’s overall meaning. The approach worked: stores began displaying the books prominently, and sales tripled. While Laughlin hoped readers weren’t buying the books solely for their covers, he was grateful that the design exposed more people to quality writing.

JOSEF MÜLLER-BROCKMANN: USE THE GRID The work and writing of Max Bill, an architect and designer who studied at the Bauhaus, influenced Josef Müller-Brockmann and led him away from his illustrative beginnings. Bill developed Theo van Doesburg’s idea of a universal visual language by using a modular grid--the underlying framework of columns and margins that guides the placement of text and images in a layout. It provides order, consistency, and flexibility, and helps to establish hierarchy. It continues to be an important tool today, especially in web design.

This grid-based approach to graphic design became the foundation of the International Typographic Style, or Swiss Style, and Müller-Brockmann was a key figure in this influential movement. He stripped extraneous decoration from his design; every element in his layout had a purpose. Over time, his work grew increasingly abstract.

For example, he designed a series of concert posters for Zurich’s Tonhalle. There were no music notes or instruments. Geometric shapes and lines were placed on the grid, but were varied in position and scale to suggest movement and rhythm. The result was abstract, yet very musical.

IVAN CHERMAYEFF AND TOM GEISMAR: DON’T LIMIT YOURSELF TO ONE STYLE In 1960, Chermayeff and Geismar proposed a radical idea: a corporate logo, for Chase Manhattan Bank, that was not based on letterforms or a recognizable image. Their design was simple--four wedges rotated around a square to form an octagon--but it was met with resistance, because at that time no major American corporation had an abstract logo.

And that’s precisely why it worked; it stood out from the competition and became an identifying symbol inextricably associated with Chase. Soon, other corporations followed suit with abstract logos of their own.

DESIGN IS SOLVING PROBLEMS. PURSUE THE BEST SOLUTION, REGARDLESS OF FORM. But Chermayeff and Geismar haven’t limited themselves to a particular style. For them, design is solving problems, and they pursue the best solution, regardless of form.

They’ve designed more than 100 corporate identities, for clients such as NBC, PBS, Screen Gems, Barneys New York, Boston’s MBTA, and Pan Am. They also create digital media and exhibitions, at venues like the well-known Ellis Island Immigration Museum and the John F. Kennedy Library. Now called Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv, their strength is in their ideas, and they continue solving problems.

MURIEL COOPER: EMBRACE TECHNOLOGY Muriel Cooper had two design careers: first as a print designer and second as a groundbreaking digital designer.

As art director for MIT Press, she designed classic books, such as Hans Wingler’s Bauhaus, and the first edition of Learning from Las Vegas (authors Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour hated what she did, but many graphic designers loved it).

Cooper took her first computer class at MIT in 1967, and it bewildered her. However, she could see the computer’s potential in the creative process, and soon began the second phase of her career: applying her design skills to computer screens. With Ron MacNeil, Cooper cofounded the research group Visible Language Workshop in 1975, which later became part of MIT’s Media Lab. She presented the group’s research at the influential TED5 (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference in 1994. For the first time, computer graphics were shown in three transparent dimensions, which moved, changed sizes, and shifted focus, instead of the standard Windows interface of opaque panels stacked like cards. She made a big impact: Even Microsoft founder Bill Gates was interested in her work. Unfortunately, she died soon after of a heart attack, but her legacy in interactive design continues.

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STEPHEN DOYLE: DON’T DUMB DOWN THE DESIGN TO REACH A LARGER MARKET After working at Esquire, Rolling Stone, and Tibor Kalman’s influential M&Co., Stephen Doyle partnered with Tom Kluepfel and William Drenttel in 1985 to launch Drenttel Doyle Partners, a hybrid design and advertising agency. Drenttel left in 1997, and the studio carried on as Doyle Partners.

Doyle’s packaging for Martha Stewart’s line of home goods sold at massmarket retailer Kmart remains among his most high-profile work. And for good reason: Doyle used clean typography, bright colors, and beautiful photography to create a unified and instantly identifiable brand that included thousands of products. The packaging--and the products themselves--proved that high-quality design could appeal to everyday shoppers seeking everyday goods.

PAULA SCHER: USE TYPE AS IMAGE As a design student, Pentagram’s Paula Scher couldn’t get the hang of working with type, of formally positioning words and letters in a layout. Then her teacher, Stanislas Zagorski, suggested that she think of type in a more conceptual way, using it as the main image in her work to communicate visually as well as verbally.

In 1994, Scher took on a defining project: a new identity for New York City’s Public Theater (formerly known as Shakespeare in the Park). Director George Wolfe wanted a visual identity that looked nothing like Shakespeare, and Scher designed exactly that: a big, bold typographic language that was loud and urban and distinctive. Her street posters for the show Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk pushed this in-your-face style even further, with brash type that actually looked noisy. Scher’s design became so popular that it changed theater advertising, as more groups tried to capture the youthful vigor of her work for the Public.

JOHN MAEDA: GET A DESIGN EDUCATION John Maeda was a computer science grad student at MIT on his way to becoming a user interface designer. Then he read Thoughts on Design, by Paul Rand--an experience that shifted the course of Maeda’s career. He took a humbling message from Rand’s book: Understanding the computer did not necessarily make one a good designer. He decided to study graphic design, where he added traditional design skills and concepts to his knowledge of computers.

UNDERSTANDING THE COMPUTER DOES NOT NECESSARILY MAKE ONE A GOOD DESIGNER. Maeda then returned to MIT to teach, and founded the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the Media Lab. It was there that Maeda explored the area where design and technology meet. For Maeda, the computer is a tool and a medium. He created early digital experiences like The Reactive Square, in which shapes responded to sound, and Time Paint, a time-based program of flying colors. In his quest to educate, Maeda writes books, emphasizes creative thinking, and was the president at Rhode Island School of Design. His goal? Not to make the world more high-tech, but to make it more humane.

John Clifford is the author of Graphic Icons: Visionaries Who Shaped Modern Graphic Design, and the creative director of NYC design firm Think Studio, focusing on identity, digital, publishing, and print design.

If you’re looking for a useful marketing mantra for your startup, established business, or even your nonprofit, may I suggest this one?

My brand is more than a logo.

When I speak to audiences about brand strategy, too often they think, “Oh, I have this covered. I have a great-looking logo and visual identity.” But that’s only part of the equation.

Your brand is your core promise, essence, story. Your logo should convey the brand, but it’s not the same thing as your brand. Brand forms the foundation for your marketing efforts, but it also informs many other organizational aspects, including operations, hiring, and partnerships. Brand is the story you tell and the position you occupy in people’s minds.

Do they file you under “high-end bespoke couture”—or “fast fashion?”

There are markets and target audiences for everything but it’s your job as a business owner or marketing leader to be crystal clear about the image for which you’re aiming and how that influences everything from pricing to distribution to customer experience to—yes—visual identity.

Brand is a three-legged stool: It is conveyed visually, verbally, and experientially. “Visually” is the easy part: your logo, your colors, your design, your packaging. “Verbally” is how you talk, what you say, and which messages you convey. For example, do you lead with price, or do you lead with value?

Does your company speak in conservative, authoritarian tones, or are you more playful and whimsical in your copy?

P O L E V E D R U YO : E C I O V D N A O BR T S Y E K E E R TH R E L KIL G N I G A S S E M oss

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Ideally, your visual and verbal promises should align and lead to where the rubber hits the road: experience. In other words, once you’ve promised me, the potential customer or client, something verbally and visually, does the experience match that promise? If everything about you screams highend luxury, is that what I’m going to get? Will I get innovative and cutting-edge if you don’t spend wisely on R&D? The biggest gap for many organizations is getting the messaging (verbal) component right. They tend to either mimic their competition or speak in an inconsistent way. How can you convey messages that attract the right buyers, speak to their buying drivers and needs effectively--and, even more so, enable you to stand out in a crowded marketplace? The goal of the brand-building game is to get prospects to know, like, and trust you so that when the need for your product or service arises—when they are most ready to buy—they think of you first. Messaging can make or break that relationship.

Here are three tips to consider when crafting messaging so you can pique interest, create a relationship, and stand out from your competition.

1. Paint a picture Too many companies get caught up in talking about they do, sell, offer, or provide. They dazzle prospects with talk of whiz-bang features or a laundry list of services. But customers don’t care about you. They care about what’s in it for them: How does your product or service make my life better, my family safer, my body healthier, my business more successful, my job easier, or my bottom line bigger?

Lead with benefits from the customer’s point of view, not just bragging about features. If they have to ask, “What does that do for me?” then you have not landed on the benefit yet. I like to play a little game with my clients called “So what?”

For every supposed “benefit” they cite, I continue probing with the question, “So why does that matter to them?” until we finally land on the true benefit. Amazingly, they often go from starting the sentence with “We offer” to “You get,” and that’s how you know you’re there.

Create a vision for what life or work will be like when they use your products or services. Then you can link them to proof points about why you are able to make those claims through the features you offer. Remember, make your messaging about them, not you!

2. Walk your talk When you throw a brand promise out into the world, you’d better deliver. As I like to say, don’t write a brand check your business can’t cash. Always back up benefits with proof points.

Why can you make those claims? What capabilities do you

offer that make me believe you can lower my costs, increase my sales, remove my wrinkles, lower my blood pressure?

Proof points can be your actual features or offerings, but they can also be industry statistics, press accolades, awards, customer testimonials (social proof), or specific tests or ROI studies done on your products or services.

Back up your benefits with proof points and clearly state your differentiators from “the other guys” so we know you are more than empty marketing promises.

3. Be human As a scarred veteran of Silicon Valley tech marketing—I now work with not just tech players but other B2B and B2C industries—I dream that one day all websites, marketing collateral, and press releases will actually sound like humanspeak and not meaningless jargon. I mean, really, “best of breed solutions to maximize human capital and innovation?”

Who really talks like that? What does it even mean?

Einstein once said, “If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself.” Your copy and messaging should speak directly to the person reading it in a brochure or on a Web page. What kind of human does your company sound like? What is your brand personality? Formal and conservative? Perhaps that is appropriate to your market or audience. Or maybe you’re whimsical and sassy.

You can use brand voice to stand out from the masses and engage a prospect on a more human level. Sure, you may have to adapt to the language of your audience or industry, but that is why your brand strategy should reflect your ideal customer in sharp detail. That way, when you “speak” through your messaging, you immediately connect with the person more intimately and you can stand apart. *** You may want to perform a messaging audit of your website, materials, and sales presentations to determine whether you are leading with benefits or features and you are backing up larger-than-life claims most effectively for your audience.

You can also take a look at your ideal customers and competition and attempt to discover an authentic brand voice that helps you stand out and connect better than the other guys do.

If you work with various writers or content creators, you may have to conduct such a messaging audit often to ensure you’re on the right track. It also helps if you document your brand voice and messaging platform in your Brand Style Guide so everyone’s working off the same playbook and you can consistently reiterate the right messages over and over again, regardless of the creator.

Maria Ross is a brand strategist, author, speaker, and the founder of Red Slice. She advises entrepreneurs, startups, and SMBs on how to create an irresistible brand.

Book, Line & Sinker The New Rules of Green Marketing

By Jacquelyn Ottman

Confused on how to differentiate in the green marketplace? You’re not the only one. Jacquelyn A. Ottman, a leading voice and renowned consultant in the field, gives readers valuable insight and 20 new rules on how to brand their products as sustainable. Experts say “Jacquelyn doesn’t just have her finger on the pulse of green marketing, she is the pulse.” Ottman will first convince you that sustainability is a crucial value for the upcoming generations, and then advise you on how to market appropriately.

Anyone interested in the topic, especially business owners, should use this as a guide to navigate the ubiquitous green sphere.

By Chris Brogan and Julien Smith

Burgos and Mobolade analyze and describe the postracial marketplace by looking at the implications of the dramatic 2010 US Census results, and provide practical guidelines for how marketers can reach diverse consumer populations. Their advice: go beyond race and ethnicities to appeal to similarities. New technologies and the rise of social media, along with a dizzying array of media choices, allow marketers to target affinity groups and interestbased communities more efficiently than ev

By David Burgos and Ola Mobolade

Advertising by Design

The On-Demand Brand

This is the second edition of Landa’s book, subtitled “Generating and Designing Creative Ideas Across Media.” Greatly expanded, it aims to be the definitive text on creative concept generation and designing for advertising and marketing.

The approach to generating and designing creative integrated media advertising for brands, organizations and causes encompasses brandbuilding through engagement, community building, added value and entertainment.

Call it the digital generation. The iPhone-toting, Facebookhopping, Twitter-tapping, I-want-whatI-want, how-I-wantit generation. By whatever name, marketers are discovering that connecting with today’s elusive, ad-resistant consumer means saying goodbye to ‘new media’, and hello ‘now media’. Featuring exclusive insights and inspiration from today’s top marketers as well as lessons from some of the world’s most successful digital marketing initiatives, this eyeopening book reveals how readers can deliver the kind of blockbuster experiences that 21st century consumers demand.

By Rick Mathieson

By Robin Landa

By Peter Guber

Marketing to the New Majority

Tell to Win

Insidious Competition

There’s a reason why Tell to Win has been a bestseller since it was published on March 1st. He’s the chairman and CEO of Mandalay Entertainment, and a veteran producer of films that have earned over $3 billion worldwide and racked up more than 50 Academy Award Nominations - including his latest project, The Kids Are All Right. With box office hits including The Color Purple, Midnight Express, Batman and Flashdance to his credit, Guber knows a thing or two about branding and marketing. But don’t believe us - Tony Hsieh, the founder and CEO of Zappos.com, who sold his company to Amazon and presumably doesn’t need to read books on business and marketing, also gives it a rave review on its Amazon page.

Richard Telofski’s Insidious Competition: The Battle for Meaning and the Corporate Image tackles the latest problem facing brand imaging in the business world: how the advent of social media has fundamentally changed the nature of corporate competition. Telofski highlights a different type of social threat—what he calls “atypical” or “nontraditional”—presented by bloggers, trash talkers, “reality benders,” “digital pirates” and “culture jammers.” A company’s newest adversaries are not to be found in the marketing department of a rival business, but instead, he argues, online. These newcomers are just as clever and powerful as traditional competitors, and their method of attack is semantic.

By Richard Telofski

Trust Agents

The Global Brand

Trust Agents, by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, explores how to employ techniques that leverage social media as a communication venue, and not a sales floor. From establishing a brand as a “known good” to dealing with negative feedback, it combines the best in old-school respect, business savvy and etiquette with modern-day technology, social platforms and consumer behavior.

In The Global Brand: How to Create and Develop Lasting Brand Value in a World Market Nigel Hollis confronts the dilemma all brands must tackle when going global: how to communicate a cohesive, international brand strategy to people who view the world differently. By examining mega-brands from Coca-Cola and Pampers to Nokia and Google, Hollis explores the importance of authenticity, innovation and engaging complex cultures to establish relationships with local demographics.

By Nigel Hollis

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By Anna Simpson

The Brand Strategist’s Guide to Desire

Luxury Brands in Emerging Markets

Brands are supposed to meet their customers’ needs; but does industry understand what really matters to them?

The Brand Strategist’s Guide to Desire provides a ground-breaking model for understanding and responding to consumer desire, offering brands a way to build strong relationships and gain a lasting competitive advantage. Through interviews with sociologists, psychologists and leading brand consultants, Anna Simpson explores five common desires: community, adventure, aesthetics, vitality and purpose. She argues that, by examining motivation, companies can understand how to develop successful products and services that offer real value.

The rewards of success in emerging markets are potentially huge, and as luxury companies continue to expand their global reach, they will need to continually assess if their current strategy is delivering competitive advantage. Luxury Brands in Emerging Markets is an invaluable repository of knowledge that brings clarity to key issues and trends for practitioners, academics and students of luxury brands. It sets out to decode the luxury markets in the primary emerging markets (BRICs) and provide a rich resume of the key factors that influence the effectiveness of luxury brand strategies.

Edited by Glyn Atwal and Douglas Bryson

Breaking Through, 2nd Edition Implementing Disruptive Customer Centricity

Resurgence The Four Stages of MarketFocused Reinvention

Customer centricity is fundamental to business growth and ongoing success. Most executives appreciate the importance of it yet don’t know how to execute it or sell the processes internally.

This thoroughly revised edition of Breaking Through guides readers systematically through the ten breakthrough points of implementation, to explain how to execute a transformation to customer centricity, so that a company can engage continuously with its customers, making them allies and advocates with all the rewards that it brings.

Based on a multi-year study with several large companies, Resurgence reveals how some of the most interesting and notable brands in the world have managed to stage remarkably successful comebacks following periods of decline. The core of this book is a smart, simple four-part framework for reinvention, plus compelling advice distilled for general business readers. Yet,it also features fascinating, insider accounts of the change process, with stories from a core group of leaders at companies such as Motorola, Alberto

By Sandra Vandermerwe

By Gregory S. Carpenter, Gary F. Gebhardt and John F. Sherry

Sonic Branding An Essential Guide to the Art and Science of Sonic Branding

The Theory and Practice of Change Management Now with over 60 international case studies, 2 new chapters, coverage of CSR and ethics, video interviews with change practitioners and an improved guiding framework, the fourth edition of this best-selling change management textbook is more practical and immersive than ever.

Brands have become very important as sources of value and as a means to build value and sustain market position. Much emphasis has been placed upon the visual representation of brands. This book defines a new competitive arena in the creation and development of brands - sound.

Sonic branding is a new fast growing area related to advertising and media development of the branding experience. This will be a distinctive book and the first in this important new area.

By John Hayes

By Daniel Jackson

Brand Romance

Hit Brands

Using the Power of High Design to Build a Lifelong Relationship with Your Audience

In the battleground for the hearts and minds of customers, music is one of the most powerful tools that brands can use.

In this definitive guide to how brands harness the power of music to drive business, three leading industry experts show you how to create and execute successful music strategies with lasting impact.

Every major global brand already uses and invests in music as part of its communications but very few have created ‘hits’. Music has the power to make a brand instantly recognised and loved, so what are the secrets?

By Daniel Jackson, Richard Jankovich and Eric Sheinkop

For brands to succeed in a competitive environment they need to build a ‘loving’ relationship with their audiences. Brands need to construct an emotional engagement with audiences over time, so that they can make a genuine connection both to the brand and what it has to offer.

Featuring 15 ‘commitments’ Brand Romance reveals how to use High Design principles to build a truly effective brand. High Design goes beyond the usual rational, quantitative measures, to analyse the role that emotion can play in building brand loyalty.

By Yasushi Kusume and Neil Gridley