For the last couple years, we’ve been traveling the globe talking to leaders at some of the world’s best companies and trying to learn exactly what separates the best from the merely good. Today, we’ve published our analysis of what we’ve learned, in a report called Game Changers.
A key takeaway was that even though companies today recognize the important factors required to generate long-term growth, many are not investing resources and energy into them.
Recently, Wolff Olins CEO Karl Heiselman sat down with Co.Design to talk about exactly what we found and how it applies to businesses aiming to grow faster and do better.
Read Co.Design’s story behind the report and check out Game Changers for yourself. And most importantly, let us know what you think! We’ll publish and respond to your feedback.
At Design Indaba, Michael Wolff spoke about how to exercise your idea-creating capacity by first getting rid of your ideas. He also told great stories from his time with Wolff Olins and after, about the importance of language in design and some of the “little creatures” that have made their way into much of his work. Here are some of our favorite lines, though we encourage you to watch and choose your own.
On editorial design:
“When I hear the word ‘copy’ I always shudder, because it has implicit in it that language is just something you have to make a shape of. But language is a critical part of what we do.”
On simplicity in language:
In one scenario, there were “thousands of forms that were like the top one: ‘GIVE DETAILS OF ALL OTHER PERSONS RESIDING IN THE RENTED ACCOMMODATION WHICH YOU ACTUALLY OCCUPY OTHER THAN YOURSELF AND YOUR HUSBAND’ we asked 10 people ‘What does it mean?’ and they said ‘they’re trying to get us out of our accommodation.’ So, we changed it to ‘Who else lives with you?’
On the Shell logo:
“The colors had drifted off into bloodclot red and lemon orange and so we just warmed the colors up. Sometimes that’s all you have to do. Leave something alone. Then I started the conversation with the chairman of Shell saying ‘why do you say Shell on shell?’ and he said ‘You’re right, do you know how long it’s going to take me to get the word Shell off the shell?’ I said ‘no’ and he said ‘five years.’”
On other things:
“The wheel has existed for 8,000 years. How come we only put it on a suitcase 30 years ago?”
“What you must do with a great idea is immediately throw it away because otherwise you won’t exercise your idea-creating capacity. Just keep throwing them away because you’re going to get more and more of them.”
“I mistrust my experience in terms of using my imagination; it’s going to miscolor it, try to dominate it.”
You can see the trend in supermarkets everywhere—moms in aisles probing deeper and deeper into product labels. Knowing where something comes from and what it’s about is increasingly important to consumers. And a new survey says people are now more than willing to do the detective work to figure it all out.
Weber Shandwick recently surveyed consumers and business execs in the U.S., U.K., China, and Brazil and found that 70% of respondents stay away from a product if they don’t like its parent company. What’s more, transparency has become a necessity. 56% hesitate to buy a product if they can’t find information about the corporation behind it.
Though consumers and executives both agree that social and environmental responsibility are important talking points, consumers are also becoming quicker to point out the cognitive dissonances between what a brand says and what their parent corporation does.
A Fast Company story on the research singles out Kashi’s problems relating to its parent Kellogg: “One of the ingredients in Kellogg’s FiberPlus Berry Yogurt Crunch—the preservative BHT—gets a thumbs-down from Kashi’s Ingredient Decoder tool.” Can’t you just see your mom’s disapproving nod?
As customers, communities, and shareholders use new criteria to make their judgements, companies that are seen as irresponsible or creating products without purpose will get punished. And companies that get it right will get rewarded. Havas media documented that more than half of all consumers worldwide are prepared to reward responsible companies by choosing to buy their products—and that percentage keeps rising.
Of course, this reveals a huge opportunity for brands to distinguish themselves. Only 28% of consumers worldwide think that today’s companies are working hard enough to solve our social and environmental challenges.
How and where will businesses find responsible growth? Game Changers, an upcoming Wolff Olins report, looks at this issue from companies’ perspectives and highlights the key behaviors that are now shaping the future of business.
Which high-growth companies are stepping up to distinguish themselves by being both commercially and socially minded?
What will happen to brands that don’t innovate to create new value?
More to come. Stay tuned for Game Changers, coming soon to WolffOlins.com.
It’s too soon to know if Kodak’s Chapter 11 filing is the final death knell for the iconic brand, but the news is a timely reminder of the link between innovation and brand longevity.
Kodak’s heritage is rooted in innovation, and their best products became part of our lives in a deeply emotional way. However, Kodak’s failure to innovate goes beyond their inability to recognize the rise of digital imaging and their ill-fated foray into printers.
Their failure was one of imagination. An inability to understand that product, like brand itself, is a living idea. When you buy a product, what you’re really buying is the ability to do something. The brand is both a projection and a reflection of what that ability is and what it means in your world. Product, construed as ability, is form agnostic, and should not just adapt to, but also anticipate changes in how people will want to access and use that ability.
Kodak, like Blockbuster, Borders and others, failed to imagine product beyond product.
Now Kodak is forced to pursue ever more desperate measures to raise cash, like selling its patents, which will take it even farther away from the pioneering spirit that built the brand.
At its core, Kodak helped us see—and remember—our world. It helped us tell the story of ourselves. This is a remarkable and timeless role for a brand to play, but with Kodak’s growing gap between brand and product, the company itself may soon be a memory.
The ironies of Kodak’s bankruptcy are kind of limitless: Kodak is a classic example of a one-time giant getting outpaced by the technologies it helped invent (in this case, the digital camera).
Kodak hasn’t been profitable since 2007, having switched its focus from photography to printers (making the world-historical mistake of picking the physical over the virtual). The rest of Kodak’s value rests in the patents it owns related to digital imaging, which the company says are used in virtually every modern digital camera, smartphone and tablet.
But the demise of Kodak is also a brand tragedy.
Kodak invented a new kind of memory. It was a brand capable of freezing the present and reprinting the past.
The memories Kodak stood for were both personal – as immortalized in the famous Paul Simon song– and national – Neil Armstrong used Kodak to take the first pictures from the moon, and 80 films shot on Kodak film have won Oscars for Best Picture.
When it invented the handheld camera, Kodak created a sweet new strain of independence.
Now, that brand equity has become a soup of chemicalsand patents. Still, Polaroid bounced back after its 2001 bankruptcy, and Kodak might also find new ways to develop.
In this post, guest blogger and creative director Malcolm Buick shares his thoughts on Whtespace, our internal startup project that lets you create curated email newsletters.
In a world of content being shifted, moved, tweeted, socialized, and last but not least emailed, the creative process is relegated to being second fiddle, and productivity within the workplace takes a sharp decline. However, there is a need for sharing, and as the old saying goes “sharing is caring.”
Whtespace was born out of necessity. As a creative, my mind drifts, and distractions are many. We created Whtespace to allow for ‘whitespace’ – free to think, free to create. Whtespace lets you feel safe in the knowledge that you can be informed on your own terms – in your inbox, curated and elegantly designed.
Talk to Me is a vastly comprehensive digital innovation exhibit at MoMa NYC featuring a range of works interpreting humans’ interactions with technology, from diagrams and apps to products and spaces. Paola Antonelli, curator of the exhibit describes goal to “explore how objects communicate with us… emphasizing how the need to share information and have a dialogue with audiences is overtaking form and function in contemporary design.”
With QR codes tagging every piece and a rare encouragement to break out your iPhone and interact with the work in a major institution, the exhibit is a smart and engaging look into the closing gap between life and our relationship with more intuitive technology. Antonelli explains the dominant trend in emerging technology design in communication “people need to communicate with each other. But they also communicate with objects, with cities, with the Internet, with literally everything.”
About 20 of the projects were sourced by open submission on the online, live, micro-site facet of the exhibit, Beyond the Galleries, documenting the process of the exhibit as well as a broad database of apps, projects, interfaces, readings, discussions and more. Some notable projects include the Rubik’s Cube for the Blind by Konstantin Datz, Wolff Olins’ own Jody Hudson-Powell’s Hungry Hungry Eat Head, Tweenbot by Kacie Kinzer, along with the popular apps Talking Karl, Chris Milk’s Wilderness Downtown for Arcade Fire and AOL Artist Sascha Nordmeyer’s Communication Prothesis.
Definitely worth seeing, the exhibit runs through November 7th.
Last Thursday night, I was invited by Tim Murray, Target’s Creative Director, to join him at an AIGA event. The theme was “Collaboration: Target’s New Target” and I had the privilege of sharing the stage with Michael Ian Kaye from Mother, and Joe Stewart from Huge.
Tim reviewed work from all three agencies. Mother’s never-been-done-before marketing extravaganzas. Huge’s guest-centric e-commerce experience that deftly balances the love of shopping and satisfaction of buying. Wolff Olins’ creation of up&up, a blockbuster owned brand that boldly delivers Target-ness without saying Target.
In addition to the fact these were all collaborations with Target, what else did each of these projects have in common? They are each game changing.
What are the conditions for game changing work? It starts with an ambitious leader who has a clear vision and a desire to make a difference – both for the business and in people’s lives.
From there, game changing work requires a keen understanding of the cultural zeitgeist – tapping into what matters most to people and making a credible connection between that spirit and the business.
And lastly, game changing work must make a positive impact – change for good. Each of the examples that Tim shared certainly had a positive financial impact for Target, ranging from the most successful store opening ever to double-digit growth for one of their biggest owned brands. And as importantly, each example also made a positive impact in people’s lives. A celebration of community and creativity for Target’s Harlem store opening. The ability to get basic products, from diapers to shampoo to garbage bags, that provide both amazing value and awesome design. An online shopping experience that re-writes the e-commerce rules and reflects everything you love about wandering the aisles at Target.
What sets Target apart from the crowd is their ability to consistently expect, recognize and enable game changing work from and with their creative agencies. And that commitment benefits us all.
As the world shifts ever faster into the digital realm, we’ve spent a lot of time asking ourselves and working with clients on the questions this raises relative to their brands.
One of the key questions raised by the digital age is about the level of integration between product and brand. In simple terms how connected should they be? How mutually reinforcing?
Traditional marketing thinking would tell you that to be successful, the brand has to elevate above the product and be somewhat aspirational. However in a digital world where useful is the new cool what we observe suggests that this isn’t always the case.
For a simple example just look to Google. Is the Google brand elevated beyond the Google product, or does the Google product create the expectation and underlying narrative for the Google brand?
We believe it is largely the latter, so we decided to create our own product in order to see what we could build for ourselves.
Over the past couple of months we’ve been working with the really awesome digital product specialists Henrik and Philip from Prehype. With their assistance, we’ve been piloting our own internal VC project in New York. This is designed to identify and then create a digital product, where the product will form the underlying expectation for the brand.
We’re really excited about this pilot for lots of reasons. First, the best way to learn about digital products and the agile methods necessary for creating them is to build them for yourself. Second, because kicking off the process gave the office a real entrepreneurial energy boost at the end of the year. Third, because of the really excellent ideas people came up with (not least the idea we’re currently pursuing). And finally, because we really enjoy collaborating with folks like Prehype.
As we continue along this journey, seeking to build a brand into the product itself, we’ll post more progress reports here on the blog. So please keep an eye out.
