BrandKnew October 2014 by Brand Knew

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Dear Friends: As we steamroll into the final quarter of what has been a tumultuous year, we look at some really interesting issues in this edition of Brand Knew. Its time for a pause & review at this time of the year vide this feature on the State of Chief Marketers in 2014. Mass customization has been the talking point now for quite some time and in this sharing economy and with every individual/entity being a brand, its worth looking at Starbucksâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; effort to make each of its 23000 coffee shops look unique. We have heard about embarrassment of riches and problem of plenty which is what we touch upon in the article on Manchester United and the growing number of its sponsors. Our interpretation, perception, expectations have changed, so can the game remain the same, is also one of the questions we ask in this issue. There is also the article on how colours help brand development which many designers and identity experts will find extremely useful. And while on design, we also bring into play the 9 design ideas that shaped the Web as we see and use it today. And no issue would be complete without a reference to TIOT (The Internet of Things) and here we talk about how brands could be using it to telling effect. All this and much more, like always. Enjoy the ride!

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Suresh Dinakaran @sureshdinakaran linkd.in/1dsjYaW

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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

Defining Brand Evolutions To Better Shape Customer Experiences From binge viewing to control freakery â&#x20AC;&#x201C;6 ways brands should be using the Internet of Things Five Ways Color Affects Brand Development Do Manchester United have too many sponsors? The State of Chief Marketers in 2014 7 things brands need to know about the Internet of Things Can Starbucks Make 23,000 Coffee Shops Feel Unique? 9 Design Ideas That Shaped The Web If the brain has changed, our game canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t remain the same Are brands ready for the Millennials? Simplifying Local Marketing for National Brands via Automation [Infographic] Why and When to Re-Evaluate Your B2B Brand Strategy Book, Line & Sinker

Defining Brand Evolutions To Better Shape Customer Experiences Liesje Hodgson and Forest Young As the media and behavior landscape evolves to include connected physical, digital, and social experiences, brands and businesses must understand how to meaningfully adapt to create value. This means a willingness to get out of the way when the brand isn’t relevant, and a readiness to take center stage in moments that matter. To consistently exceed expectations, an organization must understand when and how to best support the customer in key interactions, regardless of industry or instance. This requires more than a shared language of how the brand looks, feels, and behaves. It requires tools, methods, operations and frameworks for making technology, partnership, and product decisions that places customers, and their needs, at the center. We work with teams to ensure that the products and services which customers touch are meaningful components of a broader brand experience. Watch the videos below for a sense of how we view the role of brand in delivering customer experiences.

We partner with our clients to drive a unified vision for customer experience across teams and business units—and help them prioritize the interactions that can impact their relationship with customers and broader stakeholders. By defining what a relevant brand experience design is, we help organizations to make technology, partnership, and product decisions with an understanding of how they will shape the customer’s relationship with the brand over time. Liesje Hodgson is a Senior Consultant of Innovation at Interbrand’s New York office. Forest Young is a Creative Director in Interbrand’s New York office.

From binge viewing to control freakery â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 6 ways brands should be using the Internet of Things Sebastian Dreyfus

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The Internet of Things (IoT) or the Internet of Everything – use whichever buzzword you like but businesses are only now grasping the fact this doesn’t just mean ‘mobile’, it means ‘mobility’, for starters. Customer journeys are so much more fluid– but the connections and interactions made between people and devices are still not fully understood. For the IoT to deliver for marketers, the tech innovations must be datadriven. Marketers must marry technology with human insights and next-generation storytelling to create a consistent brand message across all devices. It’s about engaging customers with personalised, relevant and connected brand messages at every turn. The assumption several years ago was that convergence of hardware would lead to one key device that we’d wander around with and control the universe – but that hasn’t emerged. In fact there’s a proliferation of smart devices, which enable the concept of mobility. And users don’t have to carry something around to take advantage of the IoT – just look at the explosion of cloudenabled devices. Personal clouds will boom over the next few years (like WD My Cloud), as people will increasingly access their digital life from anywhere and through any device. Whenever anyone interacts or engages with a device they leave a footprint. The clouds of data provide businesses with opportunities to better understand users in a different and powerful way. The growth of the internet of things – 30 billion connected devices by 2020 according to Gartner – means that the omni-channel marketing is critical for brands. And it’s a development that will force brands’ marketing and sales teams to become increasingly joined at the hip. Here are six ways brands could and should already be embracing the Internet of Things:

Cross-sector personalisation Health is definitely one of the key beneficiary areas. From Proteus Biomedical smart pills which include a microchip inside to personalised medicine, which doctors will be prescribing in a decade’s time. But what most interests me is how applicable connected devices are from one sector/use to the next. Marketers crave scale – but whilst some devices and applications are not yet ubiquitous, they are useful in multiple ways. For example, Nike Fuelbands – once a health device – is now being used to track and enhance events, like festivals. What’s invented for one specific function can pivot into multiple different uses

Exploring the possibilities 3D printing is limited only by imagination. As the technology catches up with the ambition, it will reshape the commercial world and redefine the importance, role and power of brands.

Binge viewing Anywhere and at anytime. Technology is finally enabling us to consume my favourite content in the way that suits my lifestyle. Witness the rise of TiVo and Netflix as it completely bypasses the television ecosystem.

Spreading the world Not since education was taken out of the sole control of the Church has there been such a shift in bringing knowledge to the world. Coursera offers some 200 courses to 1.5 million students worldwide. The founder Andrew Ng recently taught a class to 100,000 students…

Control freakery This is about the ability to remotely control the temperature, security and lighting in your home using your mobile e.g. with Nest. Imagine when Apple combines it with its entertainment products to capture the digital home market.

Making data work for you As ‘Big Data’ becomes the norm, businesses should learn to transform it into smart data to drive predictive marketing engines. Prescient marketing techniques that anticipate customer needs and desires accurately will not only increase relevant content and decrease waste but importantly will make customers more selective on who they engage with. Customer Engagement is about understanding the complexities and subtleties of this always-on value exchange. Fixed campaigns will increasingly be redundant and compelling stories more effective. Companies like Amazon, who innovate around the customer instead of the product will continue to create new markets and revenue streams, for example with Prime Air. Delivering customer engagement is complex – it’s not one off experiences, omni-channel solutions or new age storytelling – it requires a deep and evolving understanding of your consumer, actionable insights, next generation platforms, hardware and software and organisational change. These are all critical and steep barriers to harnessing the potential value in this shift. We’re only currently embracing a fraction of what we could with the IoT. Now’s the time to become immersed because by 2020 the market is estimated to be worth more than one trillion dollars (source: International Data Corporation). And that’s a market forward-thinking brands will want to be a part of. Sebastian Dreyfus, managing director of Rosetta Europe Image courtesy of Samsung Tomorrow

Five Ways Color Affects Brand Development Jon Feagain Web users are constantly bombarded by brand images and marketing campaigns. The saturated Web has become a place for synesthesia, capturing everyoneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s imagination and overloading the senses. That presents a challenge for designers and marketers alike. How do you captivate your audience and stand out in a sea of infinite content? One of the most important components of design that can help entities get noticed, blend in, convey the right message,

or get lost in translation, is color. Understanding the way color works and using it to your advantage can help keep you afloat in a saturated deluge of information and reach the right audience. Out of the millions of products and services vying for the attention of a single user, color applied right to a product or an entity can be a highly influential tool for marketing success. Hereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s why.

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1. Color helps boost brand perception Brand recognition can lead companies to succeed just as fast as the lack of brand recognition can lead to failure. An audience has a tendency to gain a sense of attachment to a particular brand based on visual perception alone. According to a study conducted by Loyola University Maryland, color increases brand recognition by over 80%. Selecting a specific color or a color scheme for your brand can contribute to a positive or negative reception from your audience. Colors can make your brand seem intriguing, exciting, appealing, and an agent of goodness, just as it can make your brand seem pretentious, lackluster, greedy—or in some cases, even evil.

2. Color attracts attention Simply put, color demands attention. Recent studies show that black-and-white images sustain interest for less than two-thirds of a second, and colored images hold attention for two seconds or more. If you’re not using color as a part of your strategy to stay in the minds of potential clients or consumers, you are missing out. Successful companies are capitalizing on the opportunity that color presents. One of the best examples of this is Apple’s use of color for the iMacs. Apple brought color into a marketplace where color had not been seen before, famously coining the phrase, “It doesn’t have to be beige.” The colorful iMacs reinvigorated a brand that had suffered over $1.8 billion of losses in two years prior to the product’s launch.

eye of readers. You wouldn’t see fine prints colored in vibrant hues unless they are perfectly camouflaged within the text. Consequently, color can affect your conversion rate. Highlighting fields and information with a striking color can make a difference, just as much as coloring unwanted information as subtly as possible.

4. Color helps you appeal to the right audience Research shows that different colors appeal to different demographics. The color spectrum that catches the eye of women is not the same spectrum that appeals to men. Similarly, children and adults react differently to specific colors. Designers must have a comprehensive understanding of the properties of color, what they represent and to whom. Using color schemes that appeal to the type of audience you are looking to target is an important part of effective design.

5. Color helps the audience digest information better Color leaves a lasting impact on memory and perception. A study exploring the power of color found that the use of color can improve readership by 40%, learning from 55-78%, and comprehension by 73%. Color makes up more than half of the information your audience takes in. Colors are attached to universal color perception.

Don’t get me wrong... Not all attention brands get from color will be positive. The wrong choice of color can be a catastrophic failure for a brand. Take, for instance, Pepsi’s blue crystal drink. Crystal Pepsi was discontinued after merely a year of being launched because of the negative reception of it that lead to poor sales. In some cases, what is good for the purpose of catching attention doesn’t directly translate to product or brand success. An example of that is Heinz green ketchups. Though the chartreuse-colored ketchup garnered hyped and captured people’s attention, sales of the product plummeted after the first few months of its unveiling.

3. Color can help emphasize or conceal information Perhaps the most obvious example of how color can emphasize and de-emphasize information is the manipulation of color in fine prints. It’s not enough that fine prints are tiny; they are also typically colored in grayscale to avoid catching the

Choosing the right color schemes for your design is an important part of crafting a strong and effective brand image. Consider conducting a study on what works best for your messaging rather than picking a random color that is far detached from what you are trying to convey.

Jon Feagain is art director of Adhere Creative, a Houston-based inbound marketing agency.

Do Manchester United have too many sponsors? Chris J Reed Manchester United (MU) recently announced their 40th sponsor/commercial partner. Apart from the MU finance team should anyone else be happy about this? Does it work from a marketing perspective for any of the sponsors? Why would a brand want to be one of 40 sponsors? The more brands who are associated with a football club the less likely they are to be seen or to have any cut through. The Champions League actually cut the number of their sponsors, charged more but gave them more coverage and as a result audience recognition of who they were increased dramatically. How can MU justify the monies charged with the decreased

share of voice that they are then offering? They have sponsors for everything. As well as the high profile adidas from 2015 and Chevrolet form this season they also have one of the worst wine brands in the world Casillero Del Diablo, the much maligned Aeroflot took over from Turkish Airlines as the official MU carrier, they even have a paint partner, Kansai Paint (lots of jokes about watching last year’s side was like watching paint dry), they have a an official moving partner, Yanmar, Nissin is the official noodle partner and the Hong Kong Jockey Club, for reasons only they must know, are just an “ official partner”, presumably the official “horse partner” had gone to some of their midfielders.

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Interestingly AON, (who used to be the main cub sponsor), continued their association by buying out DHL to be the training ground/gear sponsor. Slight more bizarrely (and certainly if I was Chevrolet I wouldn’t be happy) all MU’s latest signings have been revealed at their AON training ground with the new players in AON training gear. Not a Chevrolet logo to be seen. Who’s getting the value for money there? You will see by many of these names that hardly any are from the UK. MU were really the first football brand to market themselves abroad and they have reaped the benefits of this ever since. It also reflects poorly on MU to be exploiting their global fan base to such an extent without necessarily any kind of quality control. I would be very interested in whether fans remember any of their sub-sponsors, what happend to Turkish Airlines and Mr Potato Head for example? MU took the money and ran, onto the next brand who no doubt has a MU supporting CMO at the helm.

East of England for a sponsor. Hence whey they are left with the worst sponsor in the EPL the derided and disliked Wonga. com (payday loans business feeding on the vulnerable). It is often said that MU have more fans in Asia than anyone else in the world and more in Norwich for example than Norwich City do. That coin has two sides though. On a recent trip back to the UK all I saw kids wearing were Barcelona tops. There wasn’t a MU top in sight across the country from north to midlands to south all I could see were Barca tops. Bearing in mind Barca had a similarly disastrous season as MU did last year and this is not about success, it’s about marketing. Whereas kids in Spain are probably wearing MU shirts and if the rivals and EPL champions Manchester City have their way their tops too. Kids in the UK are looking globally for their associations just as kids outside of the UK are looking beyond their own home teams. It is a global game, never more so that when you see many of the top clubs playing a pre-season tournament in the United States, primarily to sold out crowds into the 100’s of thousands to market their brands to a hungry audience.

As well as having the most sponsors of any football club MU also have the worst sponsor adverts ever made. Clearly once the sponsor has paid for the association there is no budget left for the creative. MU do have to make up for the fact that they are not in the Champions League or even Europe this year so will lost at least US$30m. They have also gone on one helluva desperate spending spree and now have the most expensive football squad in the English Premier League. Sponsors seem keen to fill the gap and they are the envy of every other EPL side let alone European rivals. I admire the commercial team’s sales ability. However I think it has become a crowded market that long term will just devalue the value of what they’re selling. Other clubs are trying to copy them with various degrees of success. If you’re a more parochial football club, like my team Newcastle United, it doesn’t tend to look outside of the North

I also question what this does for the EPL’s main sponsor Barclays. Their share of voice at MU will be many times less than at other less commercially aggressive clubs. Already the directors of Barclays said last year that the sponsorship had no value and are likely to pull out after the current season. The FA Cup’s sponsor Budweiser pulled out for similar reasons and the FA have not yet found a replacement. There is only so much money to go around and aggressive and globally attractive clubs will reap the benefits of marketing the brand whether or not they are continually successful on the pitch or not.

things brands need to know about the Internet of Things Andy Hobsbawm

A tectonic technology shift is underway as the physical world becomes part of the web. Our real and virtual lives are merging, powered by smart net-connected chips and mobile devices. As the Internet of Things becomes a mainstream reality, this creates tremendous opportunities for brands: how they form direct, ongoing digital connections with customers, and how they make their business and marketing operations smarter by gaining real-time analytics about every product interaction.

4. Products become owned digital media

Products are inherently more useful and desirable when they come packaged with personalised digital services to enhance the experience of buying, owning, using and sharing them. When a physical thing – from our clothes, groceries and medical devices to objects in our home and workplaces – becomes connected, programmable, trackable and interactive, and uses data to learn and improve over time, this profoundly changes how it works.

5. Smart products build relationships

Given the global market opportunity represented by the Internet of Things has been estimated at $19 trillion by Cisco, it’s not surprising that marketers see this as a critical area for innovation and the next playing field of competitive advantage.

6. Connected data drives smarter marketing

Here are seven things that brands need to know about the Internet of Things.

1. It’s happening right now There is already a growing range of web-connected products on the market including household lights, thermostats and smoke detectors, connected cars and running shoes, as well as products that monitor the health of you, your pets and your plants. Smart products are also being used for a variety of other purposes, including preventing counterfeit goods or improving customer service experiences by making business operations smarter and more responsive.

2. What makes a product smart A smart product knows what’s wrong with it, tells you where to get spare parts for it or how to find trusted local services if it breaks down. It tracks itself and provides real-time data analytics about how it is being made, sold and used. For instance, a product knows if it’s in the right place and it can tell you if it’s the real thing and not a fake. A smart product also comes with embedded stories of how it has been made and travels with a history of usage and tips from past owners on how to get the most out of it.

3. Smart products have their own digital lives Consider what your product would do for consumers if it had the intelligence of the internet and its own digital social life. If, in effect, your customer could friend their product, what would it say? Think about the stories that your product could tell them, the advice it could give, the services and experiences and people it connect them with.

Not only can Internet of Things technologies make consumers’ lives easier by making their products better connected, but it creates the ultimate owned digital media platform for brands: their products. Formerly inanimate objects will now have the power to communicate directly with end consumers, turning them into valuable owned digital media assets that provide a direct and personalised channel to customers.

Making products smart by connecting them to the web enables one-to-one interaction between brand and consumer, allowing marketers to develop ongoing digital communications with the customers that buy their goods and build a database of direct, permission-based consumer relationships based on products and tied to transaction.

As people digitally interact with their physical products, this provides incredibly detailed first-party data about consumer behaviour that can be intelligently reapplied, allowing brands to get closer to their customers. Brands will be able to access consumer data that was previously unavailable to them – including analytical profiles on individual consumer product histories and content interests, plus real-time analytics on segment-based product usage and consumption locations and times – and in return can provide targeted offers and rewards to the customer, to help boost engagement and loyalty.

7. Products behave like the best of the web Smart products let consumers access the kind of real-time, socially-connected web experiences they’ve come to expect in their daily lives. Now consumers will no longer buy just the physical product, but also the digital services that come with it. Brands have the opportunity to add value through advice and information, alongside an online channel for highly personalised content, tools and experiences. To give a simple example, basic product information and customer help, like manuals and warranty details or repair and protect services and care guides, can now all be digitally stored and accessed from the product itself (and personalised because the product knows where you are, what wear and tear it has suffered and what information aggregated users find helpful). In short: the extraordinary opportunities for personalised customer interaction and a step-change in service delivery – along with the detailed and dynamic data that connected products provide – will revolutionise the consumer relationships that brands can build and the value exchange with their customers. Andy Hobsbawm, co-founder and chief marketing officer of Evrythng

Can Starbucks Make 23,000 Coffee Shops Feel Unique? Years ago, every starbucks felt exactly the same. Now designers ask, can 23,000 starbucks feel like 23,000 different coffee shops? Mark Wilson

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At Starbucks’s global headquarters in Seattle, a designer quietly ushers me down a shadowy hallway, tucked behind a room filled with boxes and photocopiers that it appears no one ever uses. We reach an office with the blinds drawn. She glances around, pulls a key from her pocket, and waves me inside. We shut the door and turn on the light. The room is barely bigger than a closet, finished in drab blue carpet and dull white paint. Every square inch of its walls are covered in photos of fixtures and furniture, fabric swatches, metal fasteners, and samples of wood. There are hundreds of images, possibly a thousand or more, linked together by a carefully plotted string of yarn, like some serial killer map out of a crime drama. Each string is labeled with adjectives: words you associate with any Starbucks, like “sincere” and “warm,” along with words you probably don’t, like “elegant” and “curious.” Starbucks builds some of the most architecturally stunning coffee shops in the world. In a historic bank on Rembrandtplein Square in Amsterdam, a ceiling undulates with 1,876 blocks of Dutch oak. On a double-decker train car in Switzerland, a 50-seat Starbucks with table service allows commuters from the Geneva Airport to unwind. On a street in Dazaifu, a small city in western Japan, a latticed shrine pays tribute to the god of learning. Each location is a gorgeous piece of design that makes a strong nod to its context. It just so happens that they also sell coffee. The genesis of those incredible global locations lies in this glorified broom closet. Inside lives every aesthetic idea being considered for the guts of each of the more than 23,000 Starbucks stores worldwide. These early-stage concepts are off-limits even to the vast majority of Starbucks’s own designers: Not until the collection is finalized and compiled into what the company calls The Catalog, a mix-andmatchable compendium for global designers to decorate their coffee shops worldwide, will they see what I’m seeing. This may be the most important room at Starbucks HQ. Because this is where the $58 billion company (market cap) is trying to solve one of the most bedeviling challenges for any business that grows as large it has: How can Starbucks use design to make every store feel not like a mass-produced product out of Seattle, but rather a bespoke, local coffee shop? And do it within a language that still lets you know where you are?

THE ELEMENTS OF STARBUCKS DESIGN Back in the coffee surge of 1995, when Starbucks was opening multiple stores a day, the company wanted to avoid absolute homogeneity. So executives designed four different store aesthetics around the elements air, earth, fire, and water, then filtered them through coffee jargon to become aroma, harvest, roast, and brew. The brew store, for instance, was grounded in blue and gold tones, because it was inspired by the story of Captain Ahab’s first mate, Starbuck, as well as how oceans move coffee around the globe. (If this sounds like a lot of corporate hokum, we wouldn’t argue with you.) If you set aside their aspirations to narrative, what really mattered about the brew store was that its components could be simplified into a kit of furniture and finishes, and they could easily be shipped out on a truck to a new location. It was efficient customization. As Starbucks continued to expand rapidly, though, the

compromises of scale strained that four story vision. Soon, the demands of getting new stores online were such that the designs were being mashed together. In effect, they would effectively toss any old chairs on a truck to get the next new store open. The result, as you may know all too well from your neighborhood Starbucks, was kind of an interior design frappe, in which the distinct components that might cut through the monotony of a global retailer’s thousands of stores were blended into a single concoction by the whirring blades of corporate efficiency. In this way, Starbucks’s design ethos, such as it was, became a harbinger for other problems that were coming to light in the business in the mid-2000s. Starbucks’s identity, formulated as a simulacrum of the Italian cafe, was being lost to a relentless focus on growth and profitability rather than experience. Lines backed up as baristas made a growing list of complicated blended drinks, often incorrectly. The joy of a morning coffee with a smile was lost as automated machines took over for the humans. The air grew rank with the stink of egg sandwiches. And Starbucks stock took a tumble, too.

GETTING THE BAND BACK TOGETHER In 2008, on the precipice of the subprime mortgage crisis, Howard Schultz returned to Starbucks as its CEO after an eight-year hiatus. Over the next few years, Schultz made a number of moves trying to restore what he referred to as Starbucks’s soul. He shuttered hundreds of underperforming stores; he abolished automated espresso makers, explaining to senior management that handcrafted espresso was key to the “romance and theatre” of a Starbucks cafe; he closed 7,100 stores nationwide for three hours to retrain baristas in pulling those shots of espresso; and he brought back some of the original talent that drove the mega Starbucks expansion in the 1990s, including Arthur Rubinfeld. Rubinfeld, who’s now president of global development, then wooed back one of his former lieutenants, Bill Sleeth. At the time, Sleeth was in Chicago leading store design at Potbelly, the aspiring, um, Starbucks of sandwiches. Sleeth is now VP of design at Starbucks, overseeing 350 designers and architects in 16 offices around the world, who are responsible for not only Starbucks stores, but also new Starbucks properties such as its juice concept Evolution Fresh and its Teavana tea emporiums. Sleeth has the mix of sharp features and casual grooming that peg him as a corporate creative. He has that skill of listening with real intensity, even when interrupted, before segueing back perfectly to his original point. And his voice maintains a constant hushed urgency, always spoken just loudly enough for you to lean in and hear. We sit together in a coffee house dubbed Roy’s in Seattle’s ritzy Capitol Hill district. The space is straight out of a Dave Navarro video, with red velvet seats and chandeliers constructed from sharp black metal. I’m sipping what is one of the best cups of coffee I’ve tasted in my life, a pour-over preparation of a very limited George Howell roast that’s brewed as light as tea and tastes like toasted grass.

HE COULDN’T IMAGINE DRINKING THE STARBUCKS KOOL-AID IF HE WASN’T DRINKING STARBUCKS COFFEE.

If Sleeth hadn’t told me, I’d never had known Roy’s vampireapproved environment was actually a Starbucks that had opened as an experiment in 2007. Similarly, I’d never had known that Sleeth and the Roy’s staff have a wonderfully sensitive taste in coffee--completely contrarian to Starbucks’s palate-numbing dark roasts--had he not demonstrated his street cred by ordering for us. Roy’s is clearly a store designed to subvert expectations of what a Starbucks can be, and it is a well-worn stop on the tour of any journalist who visits the company. [See Danielle Sacks’s feature The Multimillion Dollar Quest To Brew The Perfect Cup Of Coffee and our 2012 Starbucks feature, both of which feature visits to Roy’s and the requisite “I can’t believe this is a Starbucks!” moment]. What’s curious is that Rubinfeld dropped Sleeth off here amidst their negotiation process back in 2009, knowing that Roy’s might be able to woo him in a way that Rubinfeld alone couldn’t. At the time, Sleeth was making relatives in Portland, Oregon, ship him Stumptown coffee each week--at the time one of the hottest indie labels in coffee--and couldn’t imagine drinking the Starbucks Kool-Aid if he wasn’t drinking Starbucks coffee. The zealots at Roy’s, with a passion for pour over and hacking $11,000 Clover coffee machines to override automated brewing controls, won him over, even though Sleeth jokes that Roy’s is “a little gothic, yes?” when we first sit down.

HE WANTS TO FOSTER MORE ‘MY STARBUCKS’S AND LESS WHAT PEOPLE CALL ‘THAT STARBUCKS.’

The strange, ‘90s rockstar vibe of Roy’s offers me the perfect rationale to ask Sleeth about the elusive “Starbucks Experience.” What is it, really? What makes a Starbucks a Starbucks? The green aprons, he responds. The “engine,” as he calls it-the way you walk through the line, passing by the pastries, checking out, and waiting for your drink. Those elements are always the same. And the coffee, of course. Roy’s breaks at least two of these three rules. But then again, today, Sleeth is thinking about Starbucks less in terms of stringent brand standards and more as a kind of intrinsic feeling. He wants to foster more of what people call “my Starbucks” and less what people call “that Starbucks.” That’s not only what Roy’s does, but all of Starbucks’s most successful stores. People personally identify them as theirs, they feel some connection to it, and even ownership over it. “Sometimes when you look at the ‘my Starbucks’ and the

‘that Starbucks,’ you’ll see there’s really something different between them,” Sleeth says. “The my just feels more comfortable. It feels more natural.”

BUILDING MY STARBUCKS When Sleeth returned to Starbucks in 2009, he inherited what was then a new collection of three distinct store designs. Heritage celebrated patina, with worn wood floors and reclaimed timber facades that fit Starbucks in historic buildings. Regional Modern leveraged light-filled loft aesthetics to feel like an architecture studio, to feel like the perfect creative space in urban, commercial buildings. Finally, there was Artisan, inspired by an artist’s studio, with world market furnishings and exposed steel beams. At this point, he figured out something fundamentally wrong with the Starbucks approach to store design that may seem obvious in retrospect: Whether it’s four types of Starbucks modeled after the elements, or three types of Starbucks named like J.Crew collections, when you scale those few designs to tens of thousands of stores, they would quickly feel generic anyway. Much of the international design team had already recognized this problem and had tacitly begun to mix and match within the three Starbucks palettes when sharing their concepts for new stores. “Our designers were already going, ‘Well, it’s kind of Artisan with a little Heritage, with one Regional Modern piece,” Sleeth explains. “The best Starbucks are eclectic,” he says, explaining their rationale. “Like an interesting person who has collected things THE BEST STARBUCKS from around the world, you’ll see all kinds of stuff ARE ECLECTIC, LIKE in our best stores.”

AN INTERESTING PERSON WHO HAS COLLECTED THINGS FROM AROUND THE WORLD.

Duly inspired, Sleeth threw out the idea of kits and palettes altogether. He organized the existing three Starbucks collections of furniture, fixtures, and finishes into one massive, interoperable database called The Catalog. About 100 items in it are recognizable Starbucks staples, sturdy furnishings like their classic schoolhouse chair or the brick back-splashes behind their bars. Another 50 to 80 items make up what the company calls its “collection”: These are its more aggressively styled fixtures, art pieces, and the like that are refreshed every six months, akin to a spring and fall collection. The end result is a symbiosis of the kind of stringent operational structure you’d expect from a company that generated more than $14 billion in revenue last year

combined with a soft creative touch. Ironically, you won’t find anything as outre as Roy’s black chandeliers in The Catalog. Not this season, at least. At this point, Sleeth’s strategy seems to have forked. In one direction, his team began to see what was possible with big budget customization, and began to build all of those aforementioned architecturally and experientially wondrous flagship stores that celebrate local culture and customs. What’s notable as well is that these Starbucks flagships make money. These aren’t loss leaders designed merely to create a halo for the ho-hum drive-thrus built inside failed Arby’s franchises. The crazy customized ideas are held to the same revenue expectations as other stores. In a way, they prove the value of mass customization . . . though you couldn’t drop a 4,300-square-foot Starbucks, with fixtures crafted by 30 local artisans, into a rest stop off I-80 as you’re zooming through Indiana on the way to Chicago. Which is why, in the other direction, Sleeth’s team spearheaded a new style of Starbucks that allowed the company to penetrate low-traffic markets, a mass produced, mass customizable, LEED-certified coffee hut resourcefully wrapped in regional materials. Its inspiration? A spare shipping container. That aesthetic is probably not a coincidence given that Starbucks HQ backs to a massive shipping yard housing thousands of such containers, meaning that even its mass-manufactured idea was, in essence, locally inspired. Somewhere in between these two extremes--of big money, fully custom build-outs and budget-friendly, mass-customized shipping containers, sits the future of your typical corner Starbucks, and the fairly heady, ambitious attempt at “mass localization.” Rather than translate the Starbucks Experience into a few flagships or three or four replicable formulas, Sleeth’s goal is to create more than 21,500 unique coffee houses that feel like they were born from and belong to the local culture.

BACK IN THE CLOSET I’m standing in that secret room, looking at the latest candidates for The Catalog, attempting to memorize everything that I see, tracing the precise lines of hand-blown glass fixtures, focusing my eyes on a particular shade of green that I hope to burn into my retinas to see if it becomes a trend. There were certainly some “warm” pieces in here. “Elegant” ones, too. But wasn’t I looking at the apotheosis of a design slurry? How was the one Starbucks catalog today fundamentally any different than the monotonous, single-

aesthetic approach Starbucks introduced in the late ‘90s? Wasn’t Starbucks just repeating itself? The difference, I’m told, is that ideas don’t just flow out of this room to the rest of the globe. Sleeth opened the secret room’s door (figuratively!) for new ideas from his offices around the world. Rather than Starbucks Seattle dictating the complete look and feel of a Starbucks in Tokyo, the Tokyo design studio was given the budget to source regional goods that make sense in a Tokyo coffee shop. And Tokyo’s best ideas might even be sucked back into the Starbucks catalog. A perfect example of this two-way cultural significance might be in Brazil, where a tropic climate has pulled people outside, and in turn, local Starbucks designers have built out patios, complete with custom furniture, that resonate with the sunloving locals in ways that rich indoor furnishings don’t. Now, Starbucks Seattle is absorbing these fresh patio ideas back into their catalog of global design. Chair developed in Brazil, being considered for US catalog. “I want people to feel like it’s their Starbucks,” Sleeth reiterates. “A small percentage of that is identifiable; a lot of it is intangible. That’s why I’d rather put it in the hands of a local designer than to try to crack that code from here.” Of course, even on the local level, style and culture can still change on a whim. The last thing Starbucks needs is to have their haircut trapped in the Friends era. That’s why Sleeth is also pushing his designers and supply chain to operate with the expediency of the fashion industry. “Ideally, we’d kind of have a cadence, where we’d introduce a collection, and then we would augment it,” Sleeth says. He imagines every Starbucks constantly swapping in fresh pieces here and there to remain relevant and surprising. “We don’t just take the new thing and ignore the old thing,” Sleeth explains. “We want it to be like this”--he twists his fingers-”so we would show the new collection integrated with the old stuff.” That seamless integration can be accomplished by manufacturing new items, but it can also stem from good old-fashioned repurposing, too. What ships globally as an unfinished chair may, with a bit of stain, become a walnut chair in Brazil, and then, seasons later, with a fresh coat of paint, a neon orange seat. Upcycling is an old idea to home makeover shows, but a somewhat radical, and more sustainable one for a global corporation. When you consider that such constant, micro-branded decisions are being made by local designers, it only cements how important the interplay between the Starbucks mothership

and its regional offices will be, and how this mass local model--sink or swim--could spread to other multinational companies into the future. “In my mind, a big idea, the Holy Grail--which is probably unattainable--is mass customization,” Sleeth says. He’s assessing every item in Starbucks’s catalog for its likely shelf life. The more timeless pieces, like that classic schoolhouse chair, will be mass produced at the global level. Items with a three-to-five year lifespan will be made and distributed regionally. And the extremely trendy pieces can be purchased by designers locally, where they are swapped in and out more rapidly. “If we can develop an approach to it at our scale,” Sleeth says, “we can help the whole industry move in the right direction.”

STARBUCKS EVERYWHERE BUT NOT, LIKE, SUFFOCATING Earlier that day, I got a taste of exactly how important mass customization could be in a world owned by Starbucks. As I walked with Sleeth through the posh University Village mall, amidst such high-end retailers as Tiffany’s, Jonathan Adler, and Apple, we visited three (of four!) Starbucks in this single locale. The first was a quick in-and-out store designed for commuters, with a few tables pushed to the side walls, with lots of open space reserved for a queue of people. Another was a massive space with multiple tiers of seating and hand-written chalkboard menus that attracted the Posh Mommy set. The third was a gorgeous storefront, wrapped in finely finished, floor-toceiling wood-framed windows. At night, there’s wine and tapas on the menu. (Apparently, the fourth was inside a grocery store, and relatively unexciting, so we didn’t even bother.) If four locations sounds like a lot of Starbucks to have in one relatively confined space, know that the mall also contained a Teavana and an Evolution Fresh. In other words, if you ever find yourself thirsty at University Village, there was virtually no liquid you can drink that isn’t owned and curated by the greater Starbucks brand. This multi-faceted approach is the future of Starbucks. If Starbucks’s strategy since Howard Schultz’s return has been to clarify and reinforce the Starbucks experience, its newer strategy has been to expand what that means across new brands (and then cross-pollinate the best ideas across all of Starbucks’s properties). In the past few years, Starbucks has purchased San Francisco’s famed La Boulange Bakery, along with the aforementioned tea chain, Teavana, and the juice company Evolution Fresh. And the same Seattle Starbucks design team that coordinates coffee shop-design is also in charge of these spinoffs. As we toured that tapas-serving Starbucks, Sleeth caught glances from quiet coffee drinkers as he pointed out all sorts of little experiments his team was running inside the evening

store. There’s a checkout counter that’s a few inches lower than norm, which was designed to make the register more approachable--and in fact, it appeared to do just that. The pastry case is open air and grounded with white marble, akin perhaps to what you might see at Le Pain Quotidien. It felt suitably luxurious, though it seemed like the pastries might dry out more quickly. If these ideas perform well, proving both practical and contributing to a store’s bottom line, Sleeth intends to use those insights at Teavana or Evolution Fresh as well as other Starbucks. It’s as if Starbucks is building a giant pinball machine of design, hoping to boost their score as an idea bounces from one property to the other. Now, you might be thinking, isn’t the pinball philosophy at odds with mass localization? To an extent, you’re right. But what’s missing is how these ideas are implemented. Walking through Evolution Fresh, there’s no confusion between its gleaming white surfaces, brushed chrome chairs, and bright LCD menus and the warm wool sweater that is your typical Starbucks. Yet splashes of wood paneling along the refrigeration case and bar work wonders to cozy up Evolution Fresh. The wood that’s a dominant gene in a coffee shop is a recessive one in this juicery. And it works in both places. Remember: Sleeth knows that his Holy Grail of mass customization is unattainable. Indeed, it would be devastating in some ways if it came true. Because Starbucks is an engine and 23,000 locally owned, operated, and designed coffee shops could never be the brutally efficient caffeine and treat-time delivery systems they are without global control. It’s why Starbucks took over the world in the first place. As unhip as it may sound, chains give us comfort through their consistency and familiarity. As Sleeth put it, he wants to make every Starbucks a “my Starbucks.” But there’s a reason the “my” is the tiny part of that phrase. There may be some cachet to sit in Roy’s and be in the know that you’re really at a stealth Starbucks, but there’s a point of diminishing returns to the bespoke experience. Most people just want to know that they can sip their favorite drink from a comfortable table, with a spot to plug in their laptop, anywhere in the world that they may be. That’s the power of great branding. Starbucks will inevitably fail at true mass customization because it’s impossible to scale and implement. But getting just halfway there may be a better proposition anyway. Because “sincere,” “warm,” “elegant,” and “curious”--these aren’t bespoke design concepts. They’re universal. Mark Wilson is a writer who started Philanthroper.com, a simple way to give back every day. His work has also appeared at Gizmodo, Kotaku, PopMech, PopSci, Esquire, American Photo and Lucky Peach.

9 Design Ideas That Shaped The Web FROM EMOTICONS TO GIFS TO GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACES, THE INVENTIONS THAT OPENED THE WEB TO EVERYONE. Jim Boulton 100 Ideas that Changed the Web plots the history of the world wide web, from an electronic telescope dreamed of by a Belgian bibliophile in 1934 to Tim Berners-Lee vision of a machine that thinks. Some of the ideas are revolutionary, like the peer-to-peer network. Others are more humble like the GIF. Among them are astounding technological achievements, new economic models, ideas that breakdown national borders, ideas that blur the boundary between generating and exchanging ideas, and ideas that have changed the world. Perhaps most important are the design breakthroughs that opened up the web to a mass audience. Without these, the web would still be the playground of engineers and computer programmers. With these, the web is a place for everyone.

America Online knew a good idea when they saw one and adopted the GUI in 1989, opening up the Internet beyond

1. Graphical User Interface Inspired by the work of Vannevar Bush and Ivan Sutherland, Engelbart’s oNLine System (NLS) was the first implementation of a GUI, a virtual desktop incorporating windows, menus, icons, and folders. For an industry used to dealing with punch cards and command lines, this was radical thinking. While most computer scientists were focusing on making computers smarter, Engelbart was interested in how computers could make humans smarter. Several of Engelbart’s team went on to develop the groundbreaking Xerox Alto. However, it would not be Xerox that steered the course of modern computing. After a visit to Xerox PARC, the research centre established to design the future of computing, Steve Jobs saw the GUI first hand. In 1983, Apple released the Lisa, the first home computer with a GUI and mouse. Much to Apple’s irritation, Microsoft quickly followed suit, releasing Windows 1.0 the same year. Steve Jobs accused Bill Gates of plagiarism, Gates countered, “Well, Steve, I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set, to find out that you had already stolen it.”

the technical community. History repeated itself with the web. It was when Mosaic released the first point-and-click browser that the web started to appeal to a wider audience. WITHOUT THESE That was 1993. INVENTIONS, THE

WEB WOULD STILL BE THE PLAYGROUND OF ENGINEERS AND COMPUTER PROGRAMMERS.

Mosaic evolved into Netscape Navigator, launching with the slogan “The Web is for everyone.” Microsoft realized this was true and released its Internet Explorer browser, copying most of Netscape’s functionality. Twenty years on, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and most browsers since remain remarkably similar to Netscape’s original model. Some see this as a missed opportunity; others see it as testament to Engelbart’s thinking 25 years earlier. What everyone agrees on is that without the GUI, the web would not be the global phenomenon it is today.

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2. The Emoticon

3. Graphics Interchange Format

In 1963 State Mutual Life hired cartoonist Harvey Ball to create a smiley face for the company’s “Friendship” campaign. He designed a circular yellow face with two black dots for eyes and a simple curve for a mouth. It took him 10 minutes and he was paid $45. In 1970, brothers Bernard and Murray Spain added the line “Have a Nice Day” and sold millions of dollars worth of merchandise. Two years later, Franklin Loufrani gave the face a name and took the “Smiley” to Paris, licensing it to French newspapers to highlight positive stories. Harvey Ball’s design had gone global. When asked if he regretted not trademarking his design, Ball’s response was philosophical: “Hey, I can only eat one steak at a time.”

It’s 20 years old. It supports only 256 colors. It’s unsuitable for photographs. It has no sound capability. It’s inferior to the PNG (see below). Yet the GIF is still hanging in there. Why has it proved so tenacious? Because it can move.

The first use of the smiley face on a screen was in 1982 at Carnegie Mellon University. Jokey remarks on the computer science department’s online bulletin board were often misinterpreted and a flame war would result. At best, the original intent of the thread was lost. At worst, people were offended. Research professor Scott Fahlman pragmatically suggested it would be a good idea to mark posts that were not to be taken seriously: CompuServe introduced the GIF format in the pre-web days of 1987. It was released as a free and open specification for sharing colour images across their network.

The convention caught on and spread to other universities and research centers. The Smiley and other emoticons, like the wink ;-), grin :-D and tongue out :-P were very quickly in common use on bulletin boards across the Internet. In the mid-’80s, Japanese internet users popularized a style of emoji that did not involve tilting your head, such as (*_*) and (^.^). Other examples include a wink (^_-) and confusion (@_@), while a stressful situation is represented by (-_-;), the semi-colon representing sweat! When web chat took off in the mid-’90s, emoticons evolved into images. Instant messaging services such as ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger started offering a wide range of icons that could be inserted into text at the click of a mouse. In 1997, Franklin Loufrani’s son, Nicolas created a dictionary of animated GIF icons, based on the Smiley, to replace textbased emoticons. There are now over 2,000 icons in this dictionary and, to the annoyance of many, modern platforms ofter auto-replace text-based emoticons with these animated images. Of the phenomenon he created, Scott Fahlman says wearily, “I had no idea that I was starting something that would soon pollute all the world’s communication channels.” I like to think that, in his head at least, this statement ends with a smiley face.

A GIF supports 8 bits per pixel. This allows it to reference 256 distinct colors, chosen from a palette of millions. Each of these colors is stored in a table and given a value. When neighboring pixels are the same color, the run-length is specified followed by the color value. This is called LZW data compression, after its creators Abraham Lempel, Jacob Ziv, and Terry Welch. It means images can be downloaded reasonably quickly, even with slow modems. LZW compression was described by Welch in the June 1984 issue of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) magazine. It soon became the most popular form of data compression. What the article did not mention was that Unisys help a patent on the algorithm. GIFs really took off in 1993 with the release of Mosaic, the first graphical browser. Mosaic introduced the tag, which supported two formats--GIF and a black-and-white format called XBM. Mosaic became Netscape and, as it grew, the GIF grew with it. In 1994, Unisys decided to enforce its patent, announcing that developers would have to pay a license fee to use their algorithm. This caused outrage. It turned out that the patent covered the software that made GIFs, not the files themselves, but it was close enough for a working group to come up with a new format, portable network graphics (PNG). The PNG was adopted by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as a standard. The GIF looked doomed.

I HAD NO IDEA THAT I WAS STARTING SOMETHING THAT WOULD SOON POLLUTE ALL THE WORLD’S COMMUNICATION CHANNELS.

In 1996, Netscape 2.0 was released. It supported GIF animations--multiple frames shown in succession. The web went crazy. Suddenly there were spinning logos, animated under-construction signs, and dancing babies everywhere you looked. The PNG does not support animation. The LZW patents expired in 2004. Since then, Myspace and Tumblr have attracted a new generation of GIF artists. It is the limitations of the GIF that have made it so attractive. Within minutes, a GIF animation can be made and viewed, often without the need to click on a link. Sometimes the old ways are the best ways.

Steve Krug’s ideas on usabilty are less contentious. His seminal book from 2000 says everything you need to know about user-centered design: Don’t Make Me Think.

5. Net Art In 1952, computer scientist Christopher Strachey developed a program for the Manchester Mark 1 computer that created randomized love letters. It was the first example of computer art.

4. User-Centered Design The father of user-centered design is arguably William Fetter, an American designer who worked for Boeing. In 1960 he coined the term Computer Graphics. In 1964, he made the first computer model of a human body. Known as “Boeing Man,” this wireframe pilot was used to design a virtual cockpit ergonomically, optimizing his ability to reach the instruments. The manufacturing and design industries have put people at the center of design ever since.

With Strachey’s generative love letters, the result is secondary to the process. This typifies computer art and the Net Art movement that followed. Unexpected outcomes are welcome, opening doors rather than closing them. Even the way the genre got its name was serendipitous: ASCII artist Vuk Cosic received a corrupted email in 1995; the only words he could make out were “Net Art.”

When the webpage emerged, design was not a factor. It was a simple text document with embedded hyperlinks. The only design consideration was font size. Spoiled by a decade of desktop publishing, graphic designers shunned the limited possibilities of HTML. Engineers and computer programmers controlled the space. Webpages were information-led. Form was functional. As the web developed into a graphical environment, layout became an issue. By the late ‘90s it was chaos. Images, animated GIFs, Flash and Java applets competed for space within frames and tables. This new media was WE MUST DESIGN crying out for new rules. OUR TECHNOLOGIES Step forward Jakob Nielsen, FOR THE WAY PEOPLE engineer and usability expert at Sun Microsystems. ACTUALLY BEHAVE,

NOT THE WAY WE WOULD LIKE THEM TO.

In 1995, Nielsen launched his website useit.com. While his views were controversial, especially among web designers trying to push back the boundaries of HTML, his ideas were a beacon in the emerging field of web usability. He advocated user testing and paper prototypes that put the user’s expectations at the center of the design process. He was a champion of minimal designs that spoke the language of the user. This meant following realworld conventions and avoiding system-oriented terminology and functionality. Don Norman, Jakob Nielsen’s business partner, describes it well: “We must design our technologies for the way people actually behave, not the way we would like them to.”

Born in Belgrade, Cosic emigrated to Slovenia in the early ‘90s. While U.S. dotcom companies seized on the commercial potential of the Web, Eastern Europe was critical to its artistic development. The break-up of the Soviet Union created an optimistic, open atmosphere, exemplified by the web. Russian artists Olia Lialina and Alexei Shulgin were hugely influential. Lialina’s My Boyfriend Came Back From The War, from 1996, is a hypertext narrative, as envisioned by the godfather of hypertext, Vannevar Bush, at the end of World War II. Shulgin’s Form Art manipulates HTML’s layout capabilities, using checkboxes, radio buttons and text fields to create forms. The appearance varies from browser to browser, evolving with every release, as if it were alive. Many of the early online art projects addressed technology as the subject matter, as well as the medium. Heath Bunting’s King’s Cross Phone-In (1994) demonstrated the power of network technology. Bunting listed the telephone numbers of the public phones at London’s King’s Cross station on his website and encouraged visitors to call the numbers at a certain time, or to show up and speak to a stranger. In 1995, Jan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, known as Jodi, created wwwwwwwww.jodi.org, a website highlighting the hidden depths of the web. The site appears to be indecipherable-only when the visitor views the source code can they see the true message. The HTML takes the form of an atomic bomb. Another recurring theme in Net Art is the commercialization of the web. Webby Award-winner and “the first Internet application designed by artists,” the Web Stalker is an experimental browser. Developed by British Web Art activists I/O/D in 1997, the browser strips out the superfluous, so only the raw text, links and metadata remain

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26 The web gave artists who operated outside the traditional art world access to a global audience. Free from the commercial world of galleries and art-world institutions, Net Art was a reaction against the cultural elite, its lack of marketability making it all the more authentic. Artists and designers like Aram Bartoll, Aaron Koblin and Rafael Rozendaal continue the spirit of Net Art, but things have changed. Net Art is no longer about the huge impact of the Internet on culture. We are all Net Artists now.

6. Scaleable Vector Graphics In January 1993, Jonathan Gay, Charlie Jackson, and Michelle Welsh founded FutureWave Software. Their vision was to create a software application that allowed people to bypass the mouse and draw directly on a computer screen. They called it SmartSketch, but just as it was about to launch, AT&T scrapped PenPoint, the operating system it was built on. FutureWave had no choice but to adapt its software to the keyboard and mouse. From having a market to itself, it was suddenly competing with Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia FreeHand. SmartSketch had become a “me too” product.

With the crazy idea that it might be possible to put animations on the web, Gay and his programming sidekick, Robert Tatsumi, started to focus on SmartSketch’s animation capabilities. In 1994, the only way to do this was through Java. The results were painfully slow, but they stuck with it. The breakthrough came the following year, with the release of Netscape Navigator 2.0. This second version of the Netscape browser added a whole load of features, including Netscape Mail, JavaScript, support for animated GIFs and crucially, an API (application programming interface) for plug-ins. The ability to extend the browser via a plug-in meant that SmartSketch animations could be as fluid online as they were offline. SmartSketch was renamed FutureSplash Animator and eventually shipped in May 1996. FutureSplash immediately caught the attention of Microsoft, which was playing catch-up with Netscape and throwing everything at it, including relaunching MSN as a web TV network. Internet Explorer 3.0, released in August 1996, shipped with the FutureSplash plug-in, and suddenly it was mass market. Disney Online quickly became a client and then Fox launched the Simpsons website using FutureSplash. The six-person FutureWave team was hot property. By the end of the year, FutureSplash had been purchased by Macromedia and renamed Macromedia THE RELEASE OF Flash. The Design Director at MACROMEDIA Macromedia was musician David FLASH WAS A Hillman Curtis, the nephew of TIPPING POINT. Chris Hillman of The Byrds.

Hillman Curtis redeveloped the Macromedia website using the newly acquired software and, in doing so, created the first Flash website. A wave of non-programmers followed in his creative footsteps. The release of Macromedia Flash was a tipping point. It opened up the web to animators and illustrators in the same way as the Mosaic browser had done for the very first web designers four years earlier. Brands could at last see the potential of this new media, which attracted serious investment, prompting the dotcom gold rush. Sure, there were some dodgy moments along the way, but by and large Flash has made the Web a more interesting place.

7. Infographics The web has given us access to more information than ever before. This volume of data demands new ways of navigating it. David McCandless, author of Information Is Beautiful, says that “by visualizing information, we turn it into a landscape that you can explore with your eyes, a sort of information map. When you’re lost in information, an information map is kind of useful.”

Providing information visually is not new. Human beings have been using marks, painting images and drawing maps for thousands of years. However, true information graphics are less than 100 years old. It was in 1925, at the Social and Economic Museum of Vienna, that Otta Neurath invented information graphics as we recognize them today. Neurath’s vision was to bring “dead statistics” to life by making them visually attractive. His maxim was: “To remember simplified pictures is better than to forget accurate figures.” Originally called the Vienna Method, and later ISOTYPE (International System of Typographic Picture Education), the graphic language he pioneered is now ubiquitous, appearing everywhere, from airports to websites. While Neurath gave us the pictogram, the statistician Edward Tufte is the pioneer of data visualization. His Data Density principle suggests that the more data is depicted, the better. In order to simplify a chart, reduce its scale rather than reduce the data. Counterintuitively, shrinking most graphs improves legibility. The Data-Ink Ratio recommends that the ink used to represent data should be greater than the ink

used to show non-data. Chartjunk, the unnecessary use of graphical effects, should be omitted entirely. The Lie Factor assesses the graphical integrity of the chart; the size of effect shown in the graphic should reflect the size of effect shown in the data.

designers’ dream had come true--they could at last use any font they wish. Just make sure it’s not Comic Sans.

The rise of the social web and our reluctance to read long documents has propelled the work of information designers like Neurath, Tufte, and McCandless to the fore. It is boom time for infographics. Alongside other bite-sized, sharable content such as photos of kittens and GIF animations, infographics have become a staple part of our media diet.

Whether we are consuming media on a PC, a tablet device, a smartphone or the TV, we like content optimized for that particular device. This is not easy when they all have different screen sizes and interfaces and are used at different points of the day for different tasks.

Occurring at the intersection of art and science, infographics appeal to both creative and analytical thinkers. Done badly, you get Chartjunk. Done well, they make data meaningful and entertaining. Sometimes even beautiful.

8. Embeddable Fonts The first generation of web browsers, such as Mosaic and Netscape Navigator, displayed set fonts. In 1995, Netscape introduced the tag, allowing web developers to choose their own fonts. Technically, you could specify any font you wanted for your site; in practice, users had to have that font installed on their computer to view it.

WEB DESIGNERS’ DREAM HAD COME TRUE: THEY COULD AT LAST USE ANY FONT THEY WISH. JUST MAKE SURE IT’S NOT COMIC SANS.

The set of fonts guaranteed to be pre-installed on both Windows PCs and Aplle computers became known as web-safe fonts. These included Georgia and Verdana, the first fonts designed for the screen, and staples such as Arial, Courier, and Times. The number of web-safe fonts grew, but almost 20 years later, web designers were still limited to just a handful. Workarounds, such as Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR), enabled the replacement of text with Flash-based fonts. However, these increased page-loading times and were not universally accessible, so were not widely used. In 2009, most browsers began supporting the @font-face command, which allowed a webpage to link to a font file. Web designers celebrated. Once more, in theory, they could use any font they wished. Once more, in practice, this was not the case. Most font foundries did not allow their fonts to be freely downloaded. A company called TypeKit saw an opportunity. It licensed thousands of fonts on a web-only basis and offered a linking license to subscribers. Its platform serves fonts quickly and consistently, dealing with the differences in how browsers handle font files. Similar services, such as Google Web Fonts, Font Squirrel, and Fontdeck have now emerged. Web

9. Responsive Web Design

Websites are traditionally optimized for desktop browsers, but increasingly the most important screen is the one on our phone. It is the last screen we look at at night. It’s the one screen that cuts across our work and leisure time. Content optimized for larger screens often results in a disappointing experience on smaller screens. Cropped images, wrapped navigation, rollovers no longer working and illegible text are all common degradations. Designing for a smaller screen is equally unsatisfactory at larger resolutions. Traditionally, this has meant different layouts for each device, but with ever more screen sizes to optimize for, this is a huge task.

In a May 2010 article for A List Apart, Ethan Marcotte suggested a solution. Inspired by responsive architecture, where buildings react and adapt as people pass through them, he coined the term “responsive web design” (RWD). In the article he states: “Rather than tailoring disconnected designs to each of an ever-increasing number of web devices, we can treat them as facets of the same experience We can design for an optimal viewing experience, but embed standards-based technologies into our designs to make them not only more flexible, but more adaptive to the media that renders them. In short, we need to practice Responsive Web Design.” Responsive web design makes no assumptions about a browser window’s width. It responds elegantly to the device using media queries, a World Wide Web Consortium standard. Navigation can be adjusted, images can be repositioned, content can be re-aligned and font sizes adjusted. It is a better experience for both the user and the developer. Despite the hype, responsive design is just good design. Since the birth of the web, designers have had to create webpages that worked at multiple resolutions. Screen resolutions have always varied. Just like users, they come in all shapes and sizes. It is the designer’s job to accommodate them. Jim Boulton is the curator of “Digital Archaeology,” an event that celebrates the golden age of the website and raises the profile of web archiving. The show has featured as a key part of Internet Week, gaining global media coverage and support from The British Library, The Library of Congress, and Google.

If the brain has changed, our game can’t remain the same Dan Machen, As ad agency innovator types, we keep coming up against a familiar pushback: ‘There’s no such thing as new human behaviours; it’s just old behaviours expressed in new ways through technology.’ This makes logical sense to me – there’s just one problem: deep down I no longer believe it. My disquiet has grown so much that I’ve pitched to speak at SXSW – March’s giant tech/innovation conference – to try to get closer to the bottom of this. (Enlisting some friendly neighbourhood neuroscientists. As you do.) But before boldly going forward, let’s step back – concern over technology twisting our melons (man) is nothing new. Socrates no less cites Ancient Egyptian King Thamus, remarking on the introduction of writing: “This invention will produce forgetfulness in those using it, because they will not practise their memory.” Fast-forward a few millennia and concern over technology

affecting our brains persists – and is getting louder and more dystopian. In Luc Besson’s latest thriller, Lucy, Scarlett Johansson plays the first person to access 100% of her brain and memory. However, by increasing her brain cells’ connectivity – consequently gaining superhuman powers – Lucy seemingly sacrifices her humanity. The film deploys the ubiquitous myth that ‘we only use 10% of our brain’. In fact, obviously 90% is not redundant; functioning like series of parallel processors, the brain activates different areas depending on tasks. Key to this is the concept of neuroplasticity, where brain cells reform (like plastic) to reinforce pathways, based on new activities. Professor Susan Greenfield, UK neuroscientist, said: ”At a microcellular level, the infinitely complex network of nerve cells making up the brain actually changes in response to certain experiences and stimuli.”

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Several studies have shown the brain’s ‘plastic’ ability, even in adulthood. A 2011 study at UCL found that London cabbies learning ‘the knowledge’ enlarge the spatial-memory area of their brains. Similarly, Harvard Medical School found pianists enlarge the areas related to finger control. It seems any activity stimulating the mind and/or body can significantly rewire neural pathways and even memory – positively and negatively, e.g. pianists vs. addicts. Accepting neuroplasticity, a really profound question arises: What in the name of sweet holy Moses is our digital-device ‘fix’ doing to our noggins? Are these major shifts – the web, search engines, smartphones particularly – not merely changing behaviours, but capability in the longer term? A lot of excellent research on attention spans and comms recall says: yes – tech is changing behaviour and abilities, and we must wise up to this now. Recent research in the UK by OMD Worldwide indicates a significant reduction in average attention spans – with people looking at phones 150 times per day, switching devices 21 times each hour and using multiple devices simultaneously; 500% more than three years ago. So we are connected more, but retaining less – how many phone numbers can you recall now? Warc’s fascinating ‘Zero Moment of Memory’ paper concerns the transactive memory concept coined originally by Daniel Wegner in 1985 – i.e. sharing things to remember, like an

older couple on a trip (“You get the passports, I’ll get the euros… “). We now share memory – except our transactive partner(s) are the internet and smartphones. Have we outsourced human memory to the degradation of our human cerebral abilities? “Digital technology is a double-edged sword – although it can be great assisting me in remembering things, it also has the reverse effect by forcing me to use my own brain and internal memory less. And the less you use something, the less it’s going to work.” Warc Respondent Unsurprisingly, with reduced memory comes reduced engagement. As part of the same Warc study, two groups were engaged with content, one supported by video. While neurologically there was a richer experience, the video actually served as a distraction – reducing recall. So, while we have an ever-richer communications experience, we have poorer retention of typical messaging. The other major finding was that recall over time among heavy smartphone users was disproportionately (20%) poorer than non-users. Taken as a whole, these findings have vital implications for brands and marketers – not to mention the future of the human mind. We must halt technology’s erosion of memory/ cognition, and use marcomms to proactively employ neuroplasticity to ‘game the brain’ – inducing positive change.

5 thought-starters on gaming the brain: Short-term ads on digital devices should be media-enriched to increase neural stimulation and avoid cognitive dissonance

With tech-reliant people less likely to recall messaging, mnemonics are vital – based on spatial, personal or otherwise relatable information

Cloud storage will likely become more ubiquitous – and more heavily a transactive partner

Wearables must move towards proactively anticipating needs; glanceable info/ads ‘created not just at that moment, but for that moment’

Personal data organisation will grow in value – the search engine of self is a future service design opportunity

In The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection, Michael Harris writes: “Repetition of stimuli produces a strengthening of responding neural circuits. Neglect of other stimuli will cause corresponding circuits to weaken. (Grannies maintaining their crossword puzzle regime knew that already.)” You don’t need 100% of your brain to intuit the potential of neuroplasticity and technology’s impact – for good and ill – on the way we react, recall and respond. We need to act today to save tomorrow. Dan Machen, director of innovation at Hey Human

The State of Chief Marketers in 2014 Ayaz Nanji Chief marketers are optimistic about the current business environment; they also believe they can achieve senior managementâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s goals this year, according to a recent report from the CMO Council. The findings were based on data from a survey of 525 global chief marketers (CMOs, executive vice-presidents, senior vice-presidents, and vice-presidents, depending on the top marketing title in each organization).

mandates for top-line revenue growth and market share in 2014 are realistic and attainable. Moreover, 55% plan headcount additions this year, compared with 22% who expect reductions. Just 10% say they believe their own jobs are at risk. Most chief marketers surveyed (54%) also have increased budgets this year compared with 2013.

Some 81% of respondents say they believe management

Below, additional key findings from the report.

Digital Focus and Spend

applications, lead management, website development, and search marketing.

59% of chief marketers list â&#x20AC;&#x153;digital marketing makeoverâ&#x20AC;? (involving platforms, programs, and people) as the number one transformational project in 2014. Top areas of digital marketing investment include email marketing, website performance optimization, mobile

design

and

Improved efficiency and campaign effectiveness is cited as the top reason for deploying new digital solutions and cloudbased services. More than 70% of respondents have allocated between 10% and 30% of their budgets to digital marketing this year.

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Effectiveness and Performance Just 6% of respondents give themselves an A+ in digital marketing performance; 54% believe they are â&#x20AC;&#x153;getting better by growing capabilities and improving measurement.â&#x20AC;? 63% plan to maximize the impact and value of marketing through improved customer segmentation and targeting this year. However, only 6% see themselves as leaders in big data management, compared with 62% who view themselves as just keeping pace or lagging behind competitors. 63% of marketers rate the contributions of their agency partners as extremely valuable or pretty good. However, 66% are planning to make one or more changes to their agency rosters in the next 12 months. 41% of respondents say they will change some the agencies they work with this year because of a lack of new thinking; 40% plan to switch because business results and outcomes did not meet their expectations. Asked to rank the most effective ways to brand and generate demand in their market, 48% of respondents cite searchoptimized website marketing; events and trade shows are also seen as highly valuable.

Relationships With Peers Nearly 30% of survey participants say todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s CMO is equal to other C-level peers, and another 45% say that is sometimes the case. Only 20% say the CMO is not equal to other C-level decision-makers in status and influence. 69% say they are trusted, strategic members of the C-suite and/or increasing their stature and credibility with key business leaders. CMOs are most inclined to partner and interact with chief financial officers (58% do so), chief information officers (53%), and chief sales officers (51%). Increasing collaboration with Sales and/or channel organizations was listed as the top professional objective for the majority of respondents this year.

About the research: The report was based on data from a survey of 525 CMO Council members around the world (50% based in North America, 19% in Europe, 18% in APAC, 5% in Africa, 5% in the Middle East, 3% in Latin America); 41% of respondents are focused on B2B markets, 23% on B2C, and 35% hybrid.

Ayaz Nanji is a digital strategy and content consultant. He is also a research writer for MarketingProfs. His experience includes working as a strategist and producer of digital content for Google/YouTube, the Travel Channel, and AOL.

Are brands ready for the

Millennials? Julian Douch

In its recent communications market report Ofcom has proven that the millennium generation of 14 and 15-yearolds are the most technology-savvy in the UK. Their exposure and awareness to digital media and brand communication across all tech devices is going to equal if not surpass that of the current adult generation, which today is estimated at a staggering eight hours 41 minutes. These teens are the consumers of the future. They will have high expectations of brands when it comes to digital brand engagement. They have grown up with broadband and digital communications at their fingertips. They are already accustomed to instantaneous service and will expect brands in the future to serve to their preferences across all technologies, wherever they maybe. So what will these millennial consumers expect in the future? At the moment, it’s all about mobile. But soon, mobile will simply be a need-to-have, not a nice-to-have. For millenials, it will all be about cool tech and it’s coming fast with Apple launching its long awaited iWatch. They’ll wear it, carry it, follow it, tweet it or like it and wearable tech will be the norm, with the whole consumer experience being guided and personalised by technology. Stores will be seamlessly interactive and with tech integrated into each and every experience. From beacon technology alerting passing shoppers to what deals are taking place instore, to mirrors allowing you to try on the clothes virtually, to paying on your mobile and receiving e-receipts, through to having the gift delivered to you by a drone, tech won’t be a futuristic concept, it will be part of the millenials’ day to day. Are brands ready to deliver a sustainable digital future? Burberry is often the one to watch in terms of digital offerings. It already has interactive dressing rooms in which shoppers can try on garments, triggering interactive screens to show the product being tried on walking down the catwalk.

Digital concept stores are being introduced across the country by Argos, unveiling the store for the digital future. Highlights of the Old Street shop include a 60-second Fast Track collection service for items ordered and paid for online or via mobile, while in-store shoppers will buy at Pay and Collect podiums. But examples like these are few by comparison of the overall retailing landscape. Whilst brands are often in the press for the new cool tech they’re trialling, there is a vast majority of retailers who are lagging behind with the most simplistic digital integration to their core retailing processes. How many retailers can scan a phone with the consumer’s loyalty card at the point-of-sale? Even those who have installed digital kiosks often let the consumer encounter frequent technical issues. Whilst millenials will love new cutting-edge tech, they will expect the digitalisation of traditional retailing processes. Realistically brands can’t sustain fitting out every one of their 200+ stores, just their flagship stores, so brands need to focus on getting the basic digital experiences right. This in itself is no easy task, it takes time and investment and a move toward true omni-channel digital retailing. In doing so brands must remember to not only be good, but also be engaging. Put the millennial consumer first; fuse creativity with technology in order to enhance the everyday experience. Millenials will indeed expect the cool tech and the interactive experience, but they will also want to experience the brand, its look, its feel and its recognised philosophies. It’s time for brands to act now, get the fundamentals right, but not forget their target audience for change is the next consumer generation. The millenials are coming; retailers need to be ready. Julian Douch, partner and technical director of Open Reply

Simplifying Local Marketing for Nationa Verónica Maria Jarski

National brands often struggle to automate marketing through the local partners that sell their products, according to the following infographic by SproutLoud. Some 56% of distributed marketers say “maintaining brand consistency” is a big challenge, and 48% also say one key reason for that is “lack of marketing expertise.” The solution to such problems is automation, according to SproutLoud. Top-performing organizations that used local marketing automation technology reported 300% or more increases in revenue growth within the first 12 months of investing in the technology, according to data cited in the infographic.

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al Brands via Automation [Infographic]

Veronica Maria Jarski is the Opinions editor and a senior writer at MarketingProfs.

Why and When to Re-Evaluate Your B2B Brand Strategy Bob Domenz

Building and maintaining a strong brand require constant monitoring and nurturing. And, on occasion, a brand strategy needs to be refined or rejuvenated—or even reset to conform to an entirely new direction by the business. This article details the signs that indicate it may be time to re-brand your business. Usually, that time comes during one of the following three circumstances:

When it’s clear: Your company is about to undergo a Big Change.

When it’s fuzzy: The brand hasn’t been evaluated in

Businesses operate in dynamic environments: Customer behavior changes; technologies advance; competitor offerings, regulations, and company goals change. And that’s not a bad thing. But brands that remain static are at risk of becoming irrelevant or stagnated. And that’s when bad things can happen: • Corporate and brand strategies become misaligned. • The organization loses its sense of purpose. • Employees disengage. • Culture wanes.

some time.

• Innovation stalls.

When in a growth spurt: You’re trying to just get

• The customer value proposition weakens.

through today and don’t have a chance to think about tomorrow.

• Customers lose interest.

Why evaluate your brand strategy?

Losing relevance rarely happens via a “lightning bolt” moment. It’s more like slow death by a thousand paper cuts. In business, as in nature, stagnation breeds decay. Standing still is not an option.

Because “what got you here won’t get you there.”

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When do you evaluate your brand strategy? 1. When it’s clear

• You don’t have enough time to properly assess your current brand strategy and evaluate how it will serve the anticipated new conditions and environment it must perform within.

When your business is approaching a moment of Big Change, there will be brand implications. Instances include the following:

• Your ability to conduct the proper research to gather the necessary information and insights for evaluation is limited.

• Merger or acquisition

• Your ability to explore multiple options and adequate time to evaluate/assess them is limited.

• Entering a new market • When a new or aggressive competitor enters your market • Launching a new innovation or product • New leadership or outside investors, or both Those situations are typically accompanied by a shift in the vision or direction of the company, with tangible impacts on business strategy. Therefore, it’s optimal for the brand and business strategy to be developed simultaneously to ensure they are aligned.

• Inevitably, in reactive situations, the delayed start means a delayed “time to impact” with the new brand direction. For example, evaluating the brand strategy of two companies as part of due diligence in a potential merger affords far more strategic options and minimizes the typical scramble and “hurry up to fix it” problems post-merger.

2. When it’s not so clear Sometimes, it is much harder to realize “it’s time.” Like the proverbial frog in the pot who doesn’t notice the water is getting hotter and hotter—and then it dies—a period of time may pass until someone “wakes up” one day to find... • Customer needs have changed. • Macro forces and trends have shaped the landscape. • A product portfolio has become so large or complex, or both, that it is not only hard to sell but also hard to buy. • Your brand has been neglected, or at least not actively managed. • Your business strategies are shifting. You value proposition and messaging have become “metoo.”

3. You’re a victim of your own success When a company is experiencing high growth, often everyone is so enthusiastically busy trying to stay ahead of the demands of today that they don’t take the time to look at tomorrow’s longer road.

In business, and especially in B2B, the distinction between brand and business is synonymous in the minds of employees and customers. The B2B buyers of today demand transparency; they also demand to know the character and values of the company behind the product. In general, the earlier you evaluate, the more time you have to optimally develop and implement your strategy. To anticipate and stay ahead of the dynamic environments in which they operate, B2B leaders should frequently and proactively evaluate their brand strategy in tandem with their business strategy. Aligning both strategies will ensure that the brand remains relevant as well as maximize the performance and value of the business.

Evaluate early and often A proactive approach will increase the likelihood that you’ll be able to develop a strong and intentional strategy. On the flip side, delaying can force you into a reactive, time-boxed situation, which will compromise your strategy because...

Bob Domenz is the founder and CEO of Avenue Marketing, which focuses on helping executives launch new products and rethink new directions for their businesses and brands.

Book,

Line

The Art of Digital Branding By Ian Cocoran Use the Internet to enhance your company’s brand identity! Marketers, managers, business owners, and entrepreneurs will find a wealth of tips and strategies for building a web presence that can increase revenue, improve customer relations, and boost brand loyalty. Digital brand expert Ian Cocoran explains the traditional theories of branding and explores the ways in which they can be applied to web sites, no matter what the given industry or field. The unique needs of nonprofit organizations...

Brand Thinking and Other Noble Pursuits By Debbie Millman, Rob Walker (Foreword) The notion of the brand, like any concept that dominates markets and public consciousness, is a challenge to define. This engaging and enlightening book is an unprecedented forum on the state of modern branding and how companies and consumers can best understand the behavior behind why we brand and why we buy.

Building Better Brands:

A Comprehensive Guide to Brand Strategy and Identity Development By Scott Lerman Building Better Brands is the essential guide to creating and evolving brands. Leveraging three decades of brand consulting for legendary companies like Caterpillar, Harley-Davidson, 3M, Owens-Illinois, National Australia Bank, and American Express, as well as middle-market and new-media startups, Scott Lerman shares the processes and frameworks needed to build great brands.

Sinker Designing Brand Identity: An Essential Guide for the Whole Branding Team By Alina Wheeler From research and analysis through brand strategy, design development through application design, and identity standards through launch and governance, Designing Brand Identity, Fourth Edition offers brand managers, marketers, and designers a proven, universal five-phase process for creating and implementing effective brand identity.

Brand Bible: The Complete Guide to Building, Designing, and Sustaining Brands By Debbie Millman Brand Bible is a comprehensive resource on brand design fundamentals. It looks at the influences of modern design going back through time, delivering a short anatomical overview and examines brand treatments and movements in design. You’ll learn the steps necessary to develop a successful brand system from defining the brand attributes and assessing the competition...

Design Thinking for Strategic Innovation: What They Can’t Teach You at Business or Design School By Idris Mootee A comprehensive playbook for applied design thinking in business and management, complete with concepts and toolkits Revolutionize your approach to solving your business›s greatest challenges through the power of Design Thinking for Strategic Innovation.

Design Thinking: Integrating Innovation, Customer Experience, and Brand Value

The 46 Rules of Genius: An Innovator’s Guide to Creativity (Voices That Matter)

By Thomas Lockwood This thought-provoking and inspirational book covers such topics as: developing a solid creative process through “Visual Reflection Notebooks” and “Bring Play to Work”; understanding the artist’s unique identity in relation to the larger culture; building systems of support and collaboration; explaining how an artist’s needs and passions can lead to innovation and authenticity...

By Marty Neumeier Marty Neumeier, acclaimed author of The Brand Gap and Metaskills, has compressed the wisdom of the ages into the first “quick start guide” for genius—46 glittering gems that will light your path to creative brilliance. This is THE essential handbook for designers, entrepreneurs, marketers, educators, artists, scientists, innovators, and future leaders in every field.

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Metaskills: Five Talents for the Robotic Age By Marty Neumeier Metaskills is more than a manifesto. It’s a compass for visionary leaders, policymakers, educators, and planners. It’s a creative framework for designers, engineers, scientists, and artists. It’s a picture of the future that allows people from a wide range of disciplines, industries, and professions to envision new ways to create value together. Perhaps more important, it’s a longoverdue examination of what it means to be human in the 21st century.

Think!: Before It’s Too Late By Edward de Bono The world is full of problems and conflicts. So why can we not solve them? According to Edward de Bono, current thinking cannot solve world problems because current thinking is itself the problem. And this is getting worse: we are so accustomed to readily available information online that we search immediately for the answers rather than thinking about them. Our minds function like trying to drive a car using only one wheel.

Cracking Creativity: The Secrets of Creative Genius

Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration

By Michael Michalko n this trailblazing book, internationally renowned business creativity expert Michael Michalko shows how creative people think—and how to put their secrets to work for you. To create this book, Michalko researched and analyzed hundreds of history’s greatest thinkers—from Leonardo da Vinci to Pablo Picasso—and then brought their techniques into the modern home and workplace. The follow-up to the popular THINKERTOYS, which sold over 80,000 copies.

By Keith Sawyer Creativity has long been thought to be an individual gift, best pursued alone; schools, organizations, and whole industries are built on this idea. But what if the most common beliefs about how creativity works are wrong? Group Genius tears down some of the most popular myths about creativity, revealing that creativity is always collaborative-even when you’re alone. Sharing the results of his own acclaimed research on jazz groups, theater ensembles...

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire

Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation

By Bruce Nussbaum Smart and eye opening, Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire illustrates how to connect our creative output with a new type of economic system, Indie Capitalism, where creativity is the source of value, where entrepreneurs drive growth, and where social networks are the building blocks of the economy.

Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All by Tom Kelley, David Kelley Too often, companies and individuals assume that creativity and innovation are the domain of the “creative types.” But two of the leading experts in innovation, design, and creativity on the planet show us that each and every one of us is creative. In an incredibly entertaining and inspiring narrative that draws on countless stories from their work at IDEO, the Stanford d.school, and with many of the world’s top companies...

By Tim Brown The myth of innovation is that brilliant ideas leap fully formed from the minds of geniuses. The reality is that most innovations come from a process of rigorous examination through which great ideas are identified and developed before being realized as new offerings and capabilities.

Make Space: How to Set the Stage for Creative Collaboration By by Scott Doorley, Scott Witthoft, Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University, David Kelley (Foreword) Make Space is a new and dynamic resource for activating creativity, communication and innovation across institutions, corporations, teams, and schools alike. Filled with tips and instructions that can be approached from a wide variety of angles, Make Space is a ready resource for empowering anyone to take control of an environment.