In the Disney classic “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” you’ll remember that each dwarf’s name described their strongest attribute. Dopey was dopey. Grumpy was grumpy. Sneezy needed Zyrtec. They all probably possessed other noteworthy attributes, too, but these were their key differentiators.
It doesn’t matter how big or small the difference is; it only matters that there is one. From a communications perspective, there needs to be something you can call your own. Some people call this your Unique Selling Proposition. Basically, it’s personality.

If Disney hadn’t identified the dwarfs with descriptive names, I don’t think anyone would’ve cared for them. Who would buy a snow globe featuring the fourth dwarf from the left? Even if it was only $2.99 with purchase of a kid’s meal? However, when you differentiate all seven and name one Happy, you open up the possibility of making a real connection with a specific audience. Similarly, focusing on a point of differentiation allows you to reach a more specific market.

It’s important to realize that choosing a main message or value proposition for your product’s positioning doesn’t negate it’s other strengths. What it does do is allow people to connect with it more quickly. The dwarfs’ names were short – one simple word. If they were any longer, we wouldn’t remember one or two – let alone all seven. Our brains like to compartmentalize information, and so processing one message is much easier than processing five key points about your product or service.

The good news is that once your customers are able to process your unique personality, you own that space in their brains. If Snow White needed someone smart, she didn’t approach Bashful or Sleepy. She went straight to Doc.

If you focus on what differentiates you and develop a concise and unique identity, that territory is yours.

Engaging a design firm to work on a new project—a website, for example—is a little like embarking on a trip into the wild. In that scenario, would you plan for the best or the worst case scenario? Personally, when facing such a trip, I’d channel my inner Bear Grylls from “Man vs. Wild” and plan for the worst.

Imagine yourself transporting a very rare and fragile orchid on foot with the possibility of rain in the forecast. You’ve got a sturdy box that protects the plant and that’s easy to carry. Then it starts to rain, but you still have a mile to go. Rats! You forgot to bring an umbrella. You stop at the first store and buy one. Since you’ve already got… I don’t know… let’s say,  five umbrellas at home, all acquired in similar situations, you purchase the cheap one. Five blocks later and sure enough—the  umbrella does that inside-out thing. So you have to buy another umbrella, this time the top of the line. You can’t chance ruining that orchid.

In the end, your entire trip took you twice as long and cost twice as much because you did not plan for the worst case scenario.

Remember the old carpenter’s rule? Measure once, cut twice. Measure twice, cut once.

The investment in any project is precious. The entire team always hopes the project will go smoothly and be successful. At the same time, when you plan for the worst case scenario, you’ll probably end up somewhere closer to the best result.

He’s seen the band several times, and he was anxious for me to experience my first live show. I wasn’t as excited, but I agreed to go along. I don’t dislike Metallica, and even though I wouldn’t classify myself as a hardcore fan, I can always appreciate the craft of music–even if the genre isn’t totally my thing.

We settled into our seats next to another fan who could be classified as hardcore. He admitted that this was his 21st Metallica concert. Seriously? I’d guess he was in his early thirties, so I was surprised he could squeeze that many concerts into his relatively short lifetime. Then I marveled at his loyalty.

My thoughts were interrupted with a sound check that shook my pant legs. Impressive and frightening at the same time.

With the decibel level set to extreme, Metallica took the stage. They played lots of songs–a few that I recognized, many that I didn’t. Looking around the crowd, those of us who weren’t pumping our fists for the duration of the show were texting, updating Facebook status, or trying to capture the experience through photos or videos shot with our mobile phones. We were also outnumbered ten to one.

By this time I was over the initial shock of the volume, so I started thinking again. How do you generate so much loyalty that you can wrangle up 12,000 or so people into a single venue in any major city around the world and get them so energized that they’d stand in the same spot for two hours, pumping their fists to your music? I was impressed.

Michele turned off the audio in this clip for a couple reasons. First, she didn’t think her iPhone could properly process the volume. Second, the fans’ enthusiasm was more interesting than the music being played.

I guess I never really considered bands as brands until that moment. That’s probably a good thing for the many musicians out there. You might want to be noticed for your music first, right?

After the show, I talked with Chad about my musings and asked him what he admired most about Metallica. He went on to say that the band knows exactly who they are, that for years they rarely promoted themselves through the mainstream channels, but gained notoriety through their live shows. And they believed that if their fans were willing to pay to see them, then those fans deserved the band’s best effort every night. Their sound has evolved over the years, but Metallica’s core values are still the same: to rock louder, faster, and harder than everybody else.

Sounds like everything that a successful brand would do. Believe in the brand. Define a focused value proposition. Design for your customers and support them along the way. Reinvent yourself, while staying true to your original promise.

I started digging around to see if Metallica partnered with any design consultancies that we might know about. Several bands take pride in producing their own album covers or working with freelancers, so I wasn’t sure I’d find much. As it turns out, Metallica worked with the notable Turner Duckworth to revive their original logo and design their most recent album, Death Magnetic. More digging turned up a great interview with David Turner and Bruce Duckworth, in which the designers spoke about bands having a better understanding of branding than most companies–particularly Metallica, who has been successfully managing its brand over three decades. Reinventing themselves. Loving and believing in themselves. The whole bit. I felt validated.

I wonder if companies were to model themselves after successful bands, would they reconsider the way they think of themselves? Be more loyal to their customers? Love themselves more?

Mark’s summary of the event: “I was struck by the number of real-world solutions we learned about. Improving the patient experience isn’t something we need to wait for–it’s happening RIGHT NOW, and has been for years, and we can learn from what’s working.”

There is no shortage of incredible, moving, compassionate, and motivated individuals who have done amazing things to make the patient experience not just more tolerable, but intimate, humane, unique, rewarding, and healing–in every sense of the word. People were moved to tears several times during the two-day event. I have to admit that these stories touched me emotionally as well. By the end of the session, however, I was more confused than I was motivated.

How is it possible that something as obviously valuable as a rewarding patient experience does not exist at a systemic level? There’s been a lot of recent public debate about whether government or the free market system should shape the future of health care in the U.S., but however that shakes out, it seems painfully obvious that the demand for a better patient experience already exists–so why isn’t there a supply?

Experience-level thinking is not easy. Experience design involves many different touchpoints. Experience design involves multiple people and or departments. Experience design involves several audiences, each with their own needs. Because of this complexity, it seems that within health care, we choose the easier path. We rely on great individuals to compensate for the lack of a system. We rely on a few great touchpoints to compensate for the lack of a holistic experience.

I choose to maintain my belief that humankind is inherently good. My hypothesis is not that we don’t want to provide positive patient experiences, or that the economics do not allow for it. Instead, we have not yet invested the time and energy required to make the jump from people/events/random organizations to designed, repeatable systems.

As an economy, we have demonstrated that we know how to do this. Examples of beautifully designed holistic experiences are discussed every day at an increasing rate. The patient experience-related stories I heard at Gel were inspirational, and they have a key role in increasing awareness and providing a sense of urgency. However, these examples are not sufficient. Our society is in the process of quickly evolving beyond an economy of products and services. We exist in an experience economy.

In the next several years, it is quite predictable that delivering great experiences will cease to be a point of differentiation and instead will become an ante for just being in business. For now, most of the population is willing to accept poor experiences in health care as long as they meet our immediate needs for treatment. Reform or no reform, I don’t think this condition will be allowed to last much longer.

Recently I exchanged emails with one client who has engaged us to redesign their logo, but started to hedge just before finalizing the work. They asked if I could run down the opportunities and risks of changing the logo as I perceive them. I thought I would share my (edited) response here. It applies to anyone looking to evolve their identity.

Changing the graphic identity of any company is always a big step. Companies often get very excited about these efforts right until someone asks: “Do we have to repaint the trucks?” or “How much is that sign going to cost?” That’s about the time they get cold feet. If you find yourself at that point, ask yourself: How serious am I about it? Is it really a step my company is willing to take?

If you prescribe transformative changes and commit to implementing them, if conditions spell opportunity for you to gain market share, then perhaps now is the time to change your logo.

Is it absolutely necessary for your survival? Perhaps not. Is it the best way to signal a change? Absolutely. So the question may be: How committed are you to transforming your brand and signaling that change your stakeholders and customers? If there is not a broader commitment to change, then don’t change the logo. If there is, I can’t imagine not changing it.

If you’re contemplating such a change, you may already be in it. Are you embarking on new initiatives or strategies? Is it a new day in your market? Does your logo symbolize the best of what your company offers? Is your current logo becoming more or less valuable with age?

A new logo is the best way to signal to all stakeholders that your company is doing something different: You have been busy, you are worth another look, you mean something different today. Or, if your customer is new or never took notice in the first place, perhaps they will now.

Changing logos isn’t as scary as it used to be. It shouldn’t be a regular affair, but companies who deal in customer perception (which is to say, all companies with an eye toward the future) evolve their identities regularly. Customers are used to this.

It’s a big investment in your future, in terms of both time and money. But you’re going to be investing anyway – it’s just a matter of how. Invest in the current course, or in a direction that suggests a new future. It’s a tough time in the market for everyone, but it spells opportunity for someone.

People fear change, but to evolve is to change. Not everyone will agree at first. In fact, it’s practically guaranteed that someone won’t like any new direction. But in my experience, the best people will support progressive steps. It can take time, but good ideas generally win. What’s common practice today was new at one time.

Leaders lead. Have the courage of your convictions to confidently take a bold step.

In most organizations, innovation continues to be an event, a job, or a department – a small number of individuals that seem to fit a stereotypical description of outside-the-box or strategic thinkers.

Using the structure supplied by assessments such as Meyers Briggs or DISC, I believe there are at least four personality categories that apply to the innovation process. Each category can be considered both a step in the process and a set of skills that contribute to innovation.

Observers
Individuals obsessed with data populate this category. They read everything they can get their hands on, and they find the time to actually listen to all the podcasts the rest of us merely subscribe to. These individuals are vital for identifying what is happening, changing, emerging, or being talked about.

Connectors
People in this category are adept at finding patterns. They have a natural ability to scan large amounts of information, make connections between seemingly unrelated data, and develop hypotheses about how these data fit together and what the patterns might imply.

Evaluators
This category is reserved for people who excel at recognizing the advantages (or disadvantages) of any given idea, plan, scenario, etc. They possess keen analytical skills. Their insights are highly valuable.

Implementers
Individuals in this category set priorities and execute. They know what it takes to implement new processes and commercialize new products and services.

Thought leaders in this space are predicting a future when the organizations commonly thought of as “innovative” will be the ones who will find a way to manage around the fact that innovation is not a linear process. Innovation functions best when individuals contribute to the steps of the process that most closely match their personality. Observers observing. Connectors connecting. Evaluators evaluating. Implementers implementing.

In our office, we’re constantly passing around emails with links to articles, websites, etc. that someone here finds interesting – usually things that relate loosely to design, technology, or communication. Every once in a while one of these emails will find its way into our thinking or our processes, but more often than not these nuggets of information are digested, then lost. Not the right time, out of context, etc.

Imagine if each of those emails could be tagged and made available for the entire organization in a user-friendly format. The number of data points would grow over time. Information would group or cluster.

Now imagine an individual developing hypotheses based on these information clusters. These hypotheses could range from the predictable to the never-before-considered. Like the data points, the hypotheses would be tagged and made available for the entire organization. Also like the data points, we would begin to see clusters over time. What would happen if the organization could react to and provide critical analysis of these hypotheses?

Over time this process of discussion and analysis would begin to enable the groups of hypotheses to be categorized by their likelihood of panning out. Taking it a step further, imagine if this smaller group of hypotheses-most-likely-to-pan-out could be ranked by the organization in a Digg-like fashion.

Imagine this scenario not as an event, but as a fluid activity. Individuals could participate in as few or as many steps in the process as they felt comfortable, based on their personality. The result of all of this could potentially provide a snapshot of what the organization as a whole is paying attention to at any point in time, as well as our predictions about how these things could impact the organization, our priorities, and our rationale for what we believe deserves attention.

If getting a greater number of people involved in innovation efforts is important to an organization, this is the type of thing that needs to happen. Otherwise, innovation will remain the domain of a small number of people.

A brand is nothing more or less than the perception of your organization in the mind of your audience. That perception is shaped by experiences – a series of touchpoints as they encounter your product or service. Word of mouth, a customer service agent, your friend’s sister-in-law who works for the company, the delivery truck, the sales receipt, and your website are all customer touchpoints that add up to what you know and believe about a company – a brand. The primary touchpoint of course is your company actually delivering – not just broadcasting – value to your customers. The brand promise is the promise you have made to deliver on that value.

Often have we been hired to refresh, repackage, update, or otherwise refine a “brand,” often referred to as “rebranding.” The trouble is, too often there hasn’t been enough attention paid to making the value proposition more compelling. If the graphics have gotten more compelling, but the value proposition has not, we risk false advertising, not to mention wasting a company’s investment in “branding.” Even if you don’t see this alone as a cardinal sin, we now live in a world where customers see through empty promises.

New communications and social networking technologies have made it increasingly difficult to be anything but transparent to your customers. Customers demand it of their commercial providers and politicians alike.

We’ve been following the work of Bruce Temkin (VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research), and we recently participated in a webinar during which he shared some of his latest research on Customer Experience. His findings continue to reinforce the premise of our work. Among the useful pieces that he shared was the following chart, which lays out plainly the difference between communicating and delivering value.

Rebranding should coincide with repositioning, attending to the right side of this diagram. Communicating the value proposition, designing a great experience, is essential but follows the hard decisions required to create a good position. Too often people see branding as only what’s on the left – making promises – or worse, just window dressing, just designing a logo. Don’t get me wrong, I love logos! We live in a world of global ideograms and visual language, and it is critical to understand and capture the essence of your brand and realize its potential in your customer’s experience. But be clear about your strategy first.

Lipstick doesn’t go on pigs, and brand is not a garnish. If you are considering a rebrand, really understand your core value – what you plan to offer to whom. As Tom Koulopoulos noted in a recent seminar, innovation begins with understanding what you’re good at. It sounds easy, but it’s not.

If you’re looking for a brand consultant, throw a rock and you’re bound to hit one. If you want to dig deeper and find new ways to add value for your customer, we can help.

The first presentation (sponsored by the local AAF chapter (formerly the Ad Club) was given by Shari Short, Director of Strategic Research at Aloysius Butler & Clark (AB&C!) in Delaware, who talked about social marketing principles and techniques. Short could have been singing right from our songbook, particularly the verses about getting to know your audience through deeper, qualitative means rather than relying on straight data and demographics – too often the approach for marketing efforts. She emphasized behavioral change as a goal worth measuring, over information exchange alone. Here are the principles she advocates for social marketing:

1. Know your audience. Dig deeper.

2. Awareness is not the same as action. Think education.

3. What’s in it for them? Think benefits.

Social Marketing (not to be confused with social media) is more process than event.

We were glad to see that Short, too, uses Prochaska’s Stages of Change model (a subject of a future blog post, I think) as a way to describe the process of helping an unaware customer become a loyal customer.

Her psychology background showed as she focused on key emotional drivers for their customer work: attitudes, socials norms, facts, fear. Campaigns that do this well Short cites (not done by AB&C!) are these wonderful anti-smoking PSAs from the California Department of Health Services.

While Short brushed upon infrastructure changes within an organization to address more holistic needs of the customer – the problem we aspire to solve for our clients – she mostly showed ad campaign work as solutions. I wish she had gotten deeper into the meat of solving organizational problems.

Short also cited focus groups as the primary source of qualitative audience research, as opposed to the contextual and generative research methods we are persuing. Our Empathy work is focused on uncovering not only expressed customer needs, but also unarticulated needs that can lead to bigger product/service innovations.

A few days later I was invited to attend a Word of Mouth (WOM) marketing workshop at a client’s headquarters with Andy Sernovitz, author of Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking and CEO of Gaspedal, a WOM consulting firm in Chicago.

Sernovitz is a great advocate and educator for the WOM philosophy and techniques. WOM is all about scale and the multiplier effect, how to use the human network to get your message across. The most important metric is: How many people will one person tell?

He too presented several ideas that helped us feel our work was on track:  The medium for WOM is people, Sernovitz emphasized that the cost of customer service is much higher than the cost of providing a good customer experience (by a factor of 100:1)… making the ROI of a good Customer Experience Strategy self evident.

Sernovitz’s three-step WOM practice goes like this:

1. It’s about your value: Give people a reason to talk (in a Purple Cow kind of way), be remarkable

2. It’s about their desire to belong: Make it easy for the conversation to take place and continue

3. It’s about them feeling good: Make them feel good, smart, proud, and have fun

Other ideas he presented that we encourage:

1. Work smart and fail fast

2. Regularly listen and respond to customers

3. Commit to being part of the conversation about your company

An interesting point about WOM work is that while we have an increasing dependency on talkers who create buzz, the talkers aren’t necessarily buyers. We learned this in a hands-on way in our work with Spout.com, and it has big implications for defining target audiences and influencers.

Sernovitz encouraged our group to think outside of the typical marketing “value” mindset. He showed several YouTube movies that were mostly stunts intended to get people talking – about what, sometimes I wasn’t sure. I suppose this fits the entertainment PR mantra that any news is good news, but I wonder if too much of this kind of thinking can distract us from providing great customer experiences.

Sernovitz was great, but while I found the workshop informative and inspiring, I wondered about the bridge between designing stunts simply to get people talking and doing something genuinely worth talking about.

Both Short and Sernovitz rightly focus on the habits and uniqueness of people, and how a greater awareness of their emotional and social needs help companies better get the word out and serve their customers.

Sernovitz says that “happy customers are the best ads,” to which I’d add that great customer experiences make happy customers.

Good news doesn’t flow as quickly as bad news these days, current events being what they are. But necessity begets invention, as they say, and we are nowhere if not smack in the middle of inventive gestation in West Michigan. You’d have to be entirely under a rock not to see, hear, and smell it going on all around us. Incubators and professional groups, think tanks, and incentives, we’re pulling together as a community to take care of each other and our future.

Pollyanna? Nope. Just a long view of civilization from an old Classics major.

Community interest, involvement and energy are rising in inverse proportion to economic decline. Because, they always do.

And while we all wish it hadn’t taken a crisis to gather us to action, here we are, doing what human beings do best: taking care of each other, sacrificing time and energy to build a better future.

I love civilization. Don’t you?

The Rapid Growth piece is lovely, wonderful images by local photographer Brian Kelly. Why focus on the design community rather than directly on new business? Because designers are civilization’s new storytellers. They are the new-age bards and poets and singers, who define communities by crafting and telling stories about the community, and about business, about candidates, about products and services..

Every king had his poet. Every community needs their storytellers. Always, and throughout time. By working together to discover West Michigan’s story, we believe, West Michigan will find its voice. By working together to craft and tell West Michigan’s story, we’ll all be working against the same set of goals, playing from the same playbook, creating the same future, one we all agree that we want.

Not a bad little effort, is it?

Telling the story about our future? That’s the way human beings roll.  The way way we always have rolled. We may be speaking in new ways, singing new songs. But the human instinct for survival, providing for our future, hasn’t changed much at all.

First, this “Innovation Master Class” is clearly targeting business leaders who lead innovation groups, are working to encourage more innovative behavior into their organizations, or are managing incubators funded to encourage local growth. Innovation, of course, is easier to theorize about than do, and large organizations in particular can find it difficult to focus on developing innovative value for their customers.

We have helped both Whirlpool and Amway with their internal business innovation efforts. Tom’s course provided great insights into some of the organizational dynamics of setting up what he calls “Innovation Zones” – protected spaces where free thinking is encouraged and rewarded, and the status quo is constantly challenged and redefined. His recommendations certainly mirror our experience in the importance of working directly with business leaders, striving for both autonomy and transparency for innovation efforts, and focusing on customer-value creation.

Secondly, Tom reinforced our most recent work in customer experience innovation. (Who doesn’t like to hear they’re running on the right track?) Here are a five takeaways from the seminar:

Innovation is a threat to yesterday’s success.
Markets don’t always reward new ideas. This why our customer empathy work focuses on customer needs more than customer wants. Markets – people –  know what they have experienced, but innovation changes the experience.

Innovation is not a solo flight.
The vision of the lone innovator is dated – the world today is just too complex. Scientific papers, patents, and business innovation is increasingly co-authored and co-owned. The trend line is incredibly obvious toward collaborative innovation. Work in interdisciplinary teams and networks to find new paths. Remember that innovation is often about combination: There will be some chaos, but don’t try to avoid it. Fail fast, start learning, be agile. Innovation – as opposed to invention – is more process than product, and the future of innovation is about collaboration.

Budgeting can be an innovation killer.
Rather than managing costs, focus first on investing to create value. The greatest value of innovation results from a context of profound and prolonged uncertainty. So learn how to react quickly when you discern real sources of value. For us, this starts with a well-defined business position. Budgets are put in place to accommodate anticipated needs, and are necessary for many kinds of work. Innovation – finding new sources of value – needs room to explore.

Experience innovation is infinite.
Innovations in product design, price, and speed to market only go so far, but you can always better understand your customer, their needs and desires, and find ways to meet them that are ever better and differentiating. We continue to see a shift from product to service economy, and exploring this area is a great way to surface new innovation opportunities.

Design processes around your customer.
Organizations need to innovate the customer experience first and then work backwards to deliver that experience. When we make plans, we often get the future wrong because we don’t always understand customer behavior. Do all you can to understand the customer’s context before your next investment.