Last week Jan Chipchase gave a good talk about Pattern Recognition at PSFK’s Good Ideas Conference here in New York hosted by JWT. For those of you that don’t know, Jan works as an anthropologist for Nokia Research Center. He travels the world looking for cultural context that Nokia can then leverage to create new offers.
Usually he presents to designers, who then go off and create industrial designs and interfaces, but strategically his work has lots of implications too.
The context in which we live in is changing and so is the origin of innovation. Of the 6.6 billion people on earth, 4 billion have mobile phones. The remaining 2.6 billion people are in emerging markets, often in remote locations with little or no infrastructure. Because no precedent behavior exist for using phones in these markets, the insight that Jan uncovers is really interesting.
For instance, telecom providers might be interested in what people in Africa are doing with SIM cards. Essentially they are getting duel cellular service by combining two SIM cards and putting them back in a phone. This means that a user can access duel networks for free. This is fascinating since this is innovation from the bottom-up in practice.
Similarly in Southeast Asia, Jan showed a bottle of gasoline propped up by a brick that translated into the bare essentials of a gas station. Such things in the world challenge us as designers or strategist to think about how much we can strip down a product/service to its essentials without losing the concept of the offer.
From my viewpoint his greater point was that no matter how fast technology changes, people’s underlying behaviors don’t. If you can recognize the patterns across cultures you can begin to predict what people want in the future.
You can see more photos here and a version of the presentation here.
Following the trend of de-branding, Absolut Vodka introduces their “No Label” Edition bottle, further emphasizing the company’s slogan: “In An ABSOLUT World, There Are No Labels”.
The intent of the initiative is to challenge labels and prejudice caused by branding (which they have helped to perpetuate). In any case, this is interesting because the Abosult brand is the bottle, not the typeface or color palette. So iconic is the shape of the bottle that it does not need words.
The no label edition is now available at Colette’s online store here.
The Hundreds has an interesting interview with the founder of the brand formerly known as Freshjive, Rick Klotz regarding his recent de-branding of his label Freshjive. Read the whole article here. Klotz has decided to forego using any logos and branding starting spring 2010. According to Klotz:
“Within the streetwear culture, the promotion of a company’s brand has become downright silly to me. What’s amusing is I still really enjoy designing gear, graphics, and even logos. But when I see kids wearing company logos it reminds of people who are trying to be a part of a “tribe” or “gang”, as if they need to be part of something, which seems to go against the idea of individualism in style.”
While this may come as a surprise to some, the de-emphasis of logo identity has been around for some time. Rob Walker wrote about invisible badges in Buying In and high-end luxury brands like Christian Louboutin and Bottega Veneta have made a name for themselves by focusing on distinct patterns and materials to build brand affinity for years.
At the high-end of the market, brands have always been intended for small affinity groups rather than mass markets. These companies have created brand undergrounds where consumers need to be fully indoctrinated in the brand cultures to fully understand their subtle signalling.
Streetwear brands are similar in this sense, but until now have primarily been dominated by big logos and brand names. Just as Klotz realized, brand preferences are becoming more individual marks of style, tied to personal expression rather than logo size. The true mark of style is the fit, cut and ability of the wearer to give life to what is being worn.
This is important because we will begin to see brands like Rick Klotz’s begin to standout by reducing their visability. He will also begin to co-op existing brand marks into his nameless identity much the same way hip-hop borrowed from other music genres to tell more authentic stories.
For the first time the Northern United Brewing Company will be selling its wildly successful micro brew beers North Peak and Grizzly Peak in stores and restaurants.
The new labels designed by Minneapolis-based studio Neatly Trimmed Beard are intended to replicate the ‘old-timey log-cabin vibe’ at Northern United’s brew pubs, the designers say.
The new packaging will début in response to the trend for Homedulgent consumers looking to kick back at home.
The beer sector is seeing rapid innovation as brewers aim to meet increasing home-based demand for their offer, including the new home draught systems from MillerCoors and Heineken that allow consumers to recreate the bar experience in the home.
The AV Club has a nice list of documentaries that toe the line between reality and reel. Some common threads linking these films are that many of them never admit their fictional basis and often present the premise of the movies as straight-up fact, with the purpose of their ambiguity unclear.
What’s interesting about these documentary style films is that they reflect a lot of what is going on with brands online. We are starting to see the blurring of reality and fiction of brands and identities.
For instance, Borat and Bruno are clearly fictional characters, but the people that Sasha Cohen interviews and the situations he puts himself in are often very real. This makes for intriguing storytelling about a fictional person and his encounters with very real people. But more importantly, Borat and Bruno are brand extensions of the Ali G show. These characters help extend and reinforce his style of comedy beyond the platform that the show was intended for (cable tv).
Similarly, Mad Men achieved similar success by using Twitter to extend its characters personas. Users impersonated some of the series characters effectively extended the series beyond TV, while respecting the tone of the characters on the show.
Papa John’s also used Twitter to tell the story of its individual franchises. Each PapaJohn’s account promotes local promotions based on the region making the brand much more personal than its competitors Pizza Hut or Dominos.
In both cases the blending of fact and fiction created better realties for customers by helping people experience both brands in more intimate and meaningful ways.
I don’t know what it is about this t-shirt but it makes me smile.
Maybe it’s the bright colors and inviting look of the aesthetic. In any case it reminds me that for some, perception can become reality. Sometimes good products are poorly executed, but with a little change in look and feel, one’s outlook about a product can change. WaMu once did it successfully in the banking sector, Wii will do it for video game consoles and Paul Smith achieved it with his LA store. The look and feel of a brand often acts as a signal of a different internal culture, product offer or service promise. Sometimes a better brand reality means creating a more inviting visual identity.
Recently I was talking to a friend about the problem of Sobe’s LifeWater and it occurred me that the fundamental problem of the product is the brand.
It’s not clear why someone should spend their money on the beverage with so many other brands out there with stronger propositions, most notably VitaminWater.
Sobe seems to have taken the position of imitator not innovator. They have fallen into the trap of using the same naming structure of their top competitor, using a similar bottling system (prior to the above bottle redesign) and using similar flavor names.
Piggybacking on what Al Ries said in AdAge, Sobe LifeWater has no story. Thus far Sobe has resorted to using advertising to solve for a business problem. They have invested time, resources and money to create experiences without telling a compelling brand story.
It seems to me that Sobe needs to create a new category and class for enhanced water. Today the market for enhanced performance beverages is over saturated (no pun intended), indicating that an opportunity exist to create a lifestyle beverage for a new kind of customer with unmet needs.
To win, Sobe will need to reposition itself to create better realities for customers by creating new usage occasions just as Red Bull did by becoming the choice mixer for late night partiers and Starbucks did for office dwellers as a morning pick-me-up.
Sobe’s challenge will be to concede internally that they need a new brand idea to lead all future endeavours.
Staples City reminds me that with care and consideration, ordinary things can become extraordinary. Brands are much the same way. Cultivate and be consistently persistent about enhancing your offer, promise and products, can often lead to better crafted experiences.
Imagine if Staples sponsored the artist by creating installations in all of its retail outlets. This could signal to customers the something as mundane as staples are just the beginning to a larger world of office supplies. By reframing the product to be an experience, the Staples brand promise might become more meaningful, thus creating better realities for customers.
