Robert Jones is participating in a live web conference about naming things, this Wed at noon EST, hosted by the Guggenheim Forum. The Forum is a continuing series of moderated online discussions catalyzing intelligent conversation on the arts, architecture, and design.
On the simplest level, a name takes an object from an undifferentiated mass and makes it something individual—something unique. But what exactly does a name mean, communicate, do? How do we decide if a title is “successful”?
The forum will look through various lenses—branding, linguistics, poetics—to critically evaluate the fundamental issues raised by the relationship between something and what it’s called. Panelists include Robert Jones, strategy director of Wolff Olins; Frank Nuessel, Professor of Modern Languages at the University of Louisville; and Ben Zimmer, executive producer of the Visual Thesarus and Vocabulary.com and language columnist for the Boston Globe.The discussion is moderated by Mark Abley, journalist and author of The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches from the Future of English.
“The Name Game” will include a one-hour live chat hosted by Mark Abley at noon EDT on Wednesday, April 25, and is presented in concert with the exhibition John Chamberlain: Choices, on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, through May 13, 2012.
Go HERE for more information and instructions on how to experience the live event on 4/25.
After creating the corporate identity system for NBCUniversal in 2010, we set out to rebrand all four initiatives within the company’s Integrated Marketing group (Healthy at NBCU, Women at NBCU, Hispanics at NBCU and NBCU Green is Universal) to establish a consistent look and feel.
Dear to our heart was our work on NBCU Green is Universal (see the video up top), where the goal was to reinvigorate NBCU’s environmental initiative and let people know about their commitment to sustainability across their programming and inside their organization. The new graphics package debuted last November to be featured bi-annually during “Green Week” (which is in November) and “Earth Week” (which is right now!).
Inspired by woodblock printing and stamping, we created this graphics package to evoke a natural, handmade quality. The iconic NBC peacock feather is integrated into the logo as well as into a set of icons accompanying the brand identity.
The warmth and accessibility of the graphics encourages consumers to get involved in Green efforts using the resources available to them within their own communities.
“If you start with ‘useful’ as a first principle, then you automatically place customer need and experience first,” writes Wolff Olins head of strategy Mary Ellen Muckerman in an article in Fast Company this morning.
Muckerman continues:
“The principles and theories of UX have created a new normal in terms of brand delivery and interaction. They state that how people actually use your product is much more important than how it was intended to be used. So engaging your consumer in ongoing, iterative product development is more valuable than holding out for a “perfect” product launch.”
She looks at Apple’s ascendence over the past decade, M-Pesa’s branchless banking system, and Zopa, the world’s first peer-to-peer money lending service as 3 case studies on being useful. Continue reading on Fast Company here.
This story is also part of our Game Changers report, which you can read here.
A “Match Made in Merchant Heaven” was the headline this morning on Forbes, describing the recent partnership/funding announcement between upstart menswear e-retailer, Bonobos and department store darling, Nordstrom.Or as Evelyn Rusli of the New York Times termed it “a symbiotic deal,” whereby Bonobos will aim to illuminate the Nordstrom execs on all things online in exchange for $16.4M in cash and a retail presence in some 100 Nordstrom locations nationwide.
What’s interesting is that, while most companies are desperately attempting (and sometimes failing) to take their offline concepts online, Bonobos (with help from Nordstrom) is moving in the opposite direction – but not for the reason you might expect.
Certainly a brick and mortar presence provides a physical scale that the Internet cannot replicate. But for a company like Bonobos, who has leveraged the limitless scale of the web to grow more rapidly than most (the company launched in 2007 and is now the fastest growing men’s clothing retailer online), this physical presence is more about marketing than point-of-purchase. According to Rusli, “by 2011, [Bonobos] was devoting about 20 percent of its revenue to marketing, about double the previous year. The hope is that the Nordstrom partnership will expose Bonobos to new clients, particularly those who may not be shopping online”… yet.
I recently read a fascinating interview with Phil Libin, the CEO of Evernote, a provider of note-taking and archiving technology, about how he’s sculpted his company’s unorthodox culture. Libin hasstructured Evernote’s two offices and employee benefits around the idea of facilitating achievement, and he holistically considers the factors that may further or inhibit that goal in and out of the office.
From providing his employees housecleaning twice monthly (to get his employees’ partners on Evernote’s side) to offering unlimited vacation (and $1000 if people actually take a week off), Libin ensures his type-A employees are refreshed and happy enough to do their best work. Libin has successfully created benefits that affect people outside of the office so they can do their best when they’re at work—and feel proud of, and loyal to, the company they’re building together.
Libin has also made choices about Evernote’s physical offices that demonstrate smart, on-brand thinking. He is constantly looking for unnecessary technologies to dispense with and recently got rid of employees’ desk phones. Most offices just have desk phones by default. By asking what purpose they served for Evernote’s business, given that they’re not a sales organization, and by considering existing redundancies (like paid employee cell phones) Libin realized the landlines were extraneous and detracted from the purpose of being at a desk—getting work done. This technological subtraction helped Libin’s ultimate goal of achievement by removing barriers to it.
Libin also took steps to ensure his employees, and his two offices, one in Mountain View and one in Austin, were well connected and equally valued. He created a flat hierarchy for employees by removing any obvious markers of status (aside from compensation), and having all employees sit together. He encourages people to stay connected and to communicate in-person where possible to avoid a confusing and infuriating email (ball and) chain culture.
Libin also tries to create parity between the offices by using a giant digital screen that functions as a “window,” showing each office to the other and enabling employees to see and talk to each other—not for meetings but for the creation of a broader one-firm culture. These decisions about how to structure the offices and working environment create connections that help people achieve, therefore ensuring that every element is purposeful and in service of Evernote’s goals and brand.
Libin’s holistic thinking about the factors in and outside the office that affect employees’ work demonstrates incredibly savvy managerial and brand thinking. He constantly re-evaluates old norms, asking what purpose they serve, and whether they obstruct rather than create the clearest path to getting work done. This critical re-evaluation, this re-connecting of the dots, is also what Evernote as a product, and as a brand, seeks to do—eliminate barriers to creative achievement.
Did a smart car company in Argentina just create the first Twitter-based commercial?
But for the ASCII, it’s a classic setup for a car commercial—a little smart car takes the scenic route from city to country and back, eventually maneuvering into a tight parking space between two large vehicles, showing off its size.
In this case though, 456 Tweets by the company Smart Argentina (@SmartArg) tell the story. Viewed as series of Tweets, the piece is a kind of low-fi parallax scroll, or a flipbook where each Tweet is a re-Tweetable “page” that “moves” the car forward.
While the handle Tweets in Spanish, the only relevant language here is visual. Clever use of the Twitter machine. Seen anything else like this? Direct us to it if you have!
When I watched this film, I thought the notion of music as ‘the quickening art’ is worth talking about. Music brings people and things to life. It’s about giving things soul. It’s what makes this old dude so animated and feel like he has an identity once again.
We take it for granted, but music is essential to life. Understanding emotion through sound is deeply important when dealing with audience and interactions. If you play audio frequencies to a human, the brain will actually produce resonating matched electrical pulses back. It’s engrained in us.
So how does this work with branding? Sonic branding looks at sound as feedback and can be in the form of signifiers, like the roar of an engine and how it feels the harder you push on the accelerator, mnemonics to help you remember something, like Intel’s famous jingle, or audio iconography, like those little bleeps and clicks you hear when you get a text message or you press a button to name a few applications.
Sonic branding is not about audio engineering as much as it’s about the connotations and experiences that you can subconsciously conjure up through tiny nuances of noise, melody and tone. Just like sight, touch and smell, sound and music can unlock deep emotional engagement. I think today when we’re bombarded by so much stimulus in sound and visuals, it’s important not to overlook the deep functionality of audio in branding and memory.
Eschewing the age-old strategy of optimising a product behind the scenes and then launching it to market, Google’s strategy is just to put products out there and then work with users to perfect them. In a post shared on Google Plus, employees in the company lab known as Google X wrote: “We’re sharing this information now because we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input.” It is Google’s ability todo this kind of brand-led innovation that keeps things personalised around the product and around the customer.
According to an IBM CEO Study in 2010, 60% of today’s CEOs believe that being experimental is more important than having integrity, global thinking, influence or dedication. But how many CEOs are putting their money where their mouths are and leading the way with truly experimental companies like this one?
Melissa Andrada, Wolff Olins NY strategist, is a contributor in this week’s issue of Three Thoughts On, a site that invites guest writers to share three thoughts on a topic that interests them. Its most recent issue features Melissa on “Brand as Action,” as well as other POVs like “On Execution” by Charles Lee, CEO of Ideation and “On the Little Things” by Josh McManus, Curator of Little Things Laboratories.
Here’s an excerpt for your enjoyment, but you can read the whole the piece and discover other thinkers here.
BRAND AS ACTION
When most people define brand, the first things that come to mind are logos, catchy tag lines and advertising campaigns. But brand is much more than communications; it’s a platform for action. Brand should sit at the heart of what companies do, driving everything from their business model to their communications to their internal culture. To stand out, reach people and grow, companies will need to use brand as a tool for impact.
Lead with purpose.
The best businesses put purpose at the center of what they do. For example, GE’s brand purpose “Imagination at Work” has helped bring together its 310,000 employees across the globe and increase profits. What we’ve seen is that purpose is a powerful tool for bringing employees together, connecting with consumers and driving growth.
Make people’s lives better.
More than just a super bowl commercial, the strongest brands enable people to do more.
