RegardingDesign

Save a tree: Print on something else

When we think of printers, we usually also think of paper. Or maybe the occasional apparel item. But there are many vendors that specialize in printing and producing promotional marketing goods. While many see this type of vendor as producing nothing more than trinkets, their offerings have grown to include a surprising range.

Sure, there are typical things such as pens, T-shirts, and key chains. But now you're just as likely to find custom-printed briefcases, sunglasses, banners, and even camping tents. You can print, embroider, etch, or apply vinyl to almost anything. Clients will appreciate your ability to think outside the box and provide a unique set of products featuring this logo.

Self branding

When we speak of branding, we're often talking about branding our clients, their companies, their products. But of course, designers and design firms also want to brand themselves. And as someone who speaks to and works with too many designers to count, I am consistently amazed that they fall into so many of the same traps that they try to keep their clients out of. I wish I had a dollar for every designer who has said to me, "Well, unlike OTHER design firms, we don't have a house look." Or, "We have a special, amazing, deluxe, proprietary, patented, secret handshake system for getting to our customer's brand essence that's unlike anyone else's." In fact, very few design firms have a "house" look and those that do are and should be proud of it -- after all, clients are coming to you because they like the work they've seen you do for other people. And most of those brand discovery processes are strikingly similar: research the client, the client's industry, the client's product, and then engage in a creative process that seeks to find the emotional touchpoints between what the client is offering and the customer wants.

So, my point is this: doctor, heal thyself. To expound on what I said yesterday, it's no good to say you're funny, it's even worse to say you're funnier than everyone else, and it's especially bad to say that no one else is funny at all -- just tell a good joke and let your listeners spread the word about how entertaining you are.

Authenticity

There's a cool book out called "Authenticity." I interviewed one of the authors for the article I recently wrote on branding for Step Inside Design magazine. It was also featured in a special issue of Time magazine on big ideas shaping our world. The book and ideas behind the book focus on how the world is changing and how consumers are thirsting for the "genuine", the "real", and "sincere." But even more important, it provides guidance to businesses trying to tap into this deep consumer desire. So many companies want to say or pretend or jump onto the authenticity bandwagon -- how does a company (and the graphic designers they hire to communicate their brand) be real? Well, first off, you can't fake it. Or if you're going to fake it, do it with a very visible wink and a nudge. As the authors Gilmore and Pine say:

If you ARE authentic, then you don't have to say it.

If you say you're authentic, then you'd BETTER be it.

It's easier to be authentic if you don't say it.

In other words, don't tell someone you're funny; just tell a good joke. The same basic philosophy holds true for brands. For more info on the book, authors, and approach, go to the Authenticity book website. You can even look at or upload "Axiom Violations", which are "Anything that feels the need to explicitly say it’s 'real' or 'authentic'”.

What is branding?

According to the book "What is Branding?", a brand is "a promise of satisfaction...a sign, a metaphor operating as an unwritten contract between a manufcturer and a consumer, a seller and a buyer, a performer and an audience, an environment and those who inhabit it, an event and those who experience it...Branding is the process of continuous struggle between producers and customers to define that promise and meaning."

Okay, but what does that definition mean to us?  In my corporate communications and branding work, I often find my clients describe their brand by providing me with a list of product attributes. Then, they usually try to convince me of all the reasons these attributes are better or different or unique. Which they very rarely are. Especially in this day and age when we have endless choices for every kind of product or service, with almost indistinguishable differences between the offerings.

There are many things that go into shaping a brand, from pricing and positioning, to design and headlines. But for me, the real crux of a brand is RELEVANCE. As a customer, whether consumer or biz to biz, I don't really care how much faster, louder, bigger, or better your product is on the face of it -- I only care how those things make my life better. My job as a brand communicator is to dig deep and find out not just what the company and it's products are all about, but then make a relevant link between those attributes and the needs, wants, desires, pain, frustrations, irritations, hopes, whatever of some folks out there in the real world.

There are numerous books and articles and trademarked design and marketing processes, but essentially a good brand does something really simple: it makes you care about it enough to connect to it.

Whispering in a Noisy Room

Branding. It's one of those things, perhaps kinda like pornography, that is hard to define but everyone knows it when they see it. Except, perhaps, when the economy changes significantly. As ours is doing these days. Seems that as things get more competitive, as we have more choices, as everyone becomes oversaturated with images and options and messages, anyone marketing anything has to dig a little deeper to find a different way to get noticed. Fortunately, savvy companies and design firms are realizing that the way to get noticed in the noise is to be a little quieter. A little more confident. A little more black dress and less pink confection.

I know my corporate communications clients have been looking closely at who they are and how they communicate this to the world. I've also recently written two articles on branding and had the good fortune to pick the brains of and share the advice of some wonderful brand experts. "Whispering in a Noisy Room" is in a recent issue of Step Inside Design magazine and available to read online; "The Branding Jungle, Navigating New Media" is in the August/September issue of Dynamic Graphics magazine. Check them out. And I'll talk a little more about branding in upcoming posts.

A Case History in Sustainability

I have had the fortunate pleasure to work with many interesting clients on branding and corporate communications projects. In the last few years, naturally, many of these companies have been creating so-called "Sustainability Reports." When this was a hot and new topic, it made sense to produce something special, a piece outside the realm of more typical corporate marketing materials. In fact, this approach reflected what many companies were doing, which was tacking-on green initiatives to their regular course of business operations. However, there are some companies for whom "sustainability" is not an initiative, but simply a way of doing business.

Tandus, a carpet manufacturer, is one of those companies, and I have had the good fortune to work with them. When I first visited their offices in Georgia, it became clear that environmental awareness was a part of everything they did: not only had they developed a complete, closed-loop process for recycling carpet, but people at every level of the organization were making interesting, innovative, and postive changes to reduce, reuse, recycle, and in general, think differently about resources. Sustainability was so much a part of their corporate culture that they didn't think of it as some kind of distinct discipline; in fact, they'd been doing great things for so long, that others in their industry who were doing less had grabbed the sustainability spotlight.

However, instead of doing the typical "sustainability report", we (I worked with the New York office of Gensler on this project) decided to do a corporate report that showed all the ways the company was turning conventional wisdom on its head -- closed loop recycling and other efforts were just one more demonstration of the company's innovative approach to business. Sustainability is part and parcel of their mission and their brand. We supported the larger corporate piece with a smaller brochure that focused on education about various sustainability topics relevant to their industry.

I bring up this project as an object lesson in how designers and others working in corporate communications should begin to think about how they're developing green messaging for their clients. It's no longer good enough for companies to say they recycle and buy carbon offsets -- that stuff should be a given, like producing decent products. Consumers are looking for companies that are making SYSTEMATIC change to the way they operate. Our communications program should therefore also reflect systematic change.

Another interesting Tandus initiative that I didn't work on comes from Tricycle, a "sustainable design company" in Chattanooga, TN. They helped Tandus do away with the resource-intensive carpet sample books used throughout the industry. They created a program called Blink that combines a website and sample books that use printed swatches instead of carpet samples to assist designers in interior planning. You can read the whole story and get more ideas on sustainable design innovation in the book SustainAble.

This just in...

The Cannes Lions 2008 Festival handed out design awards this week and Turner Duckworth snagged the "first ever Design Grand Prix" for their work on the Coke brand visual identity. David Turner said that they had "set out to help re-establish Coke as a design leader." The firm also won a Gold Lion for the bottle pictured here:

For all the design winners in Gold, Silver and Bronze, check out the Cannes Lions 2008 website.