RSS
Designing Colloquy: a natural evolution
For the past five years I’ve had the pleasure of working with the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University on their quarterly alumni magazine, Colloquy.* Besides the design work I enjoy the editorial process, not to mention reading about some fascinating people and ideas that have emerged from the Graduate School.
The publication I inherited has grown and transformed over the years. In 2009, with a new editor on board, it was agreed that the design could use a dusting off and we embarked on some improvements. Most significantly, we updated the masthead to bright white and gave more room to the imagery, advancing the look-and-feel of the publication from academic journal to coffee-table material.
Our fearless editor at Harvard decided it was time for humanity to grace the covers, so we pushed even further and, for the debut issues, selected intimate shots of real Harvard alumni in close proximity to the camera. On the interior we revamped the feature articles design to set the stage for the stories being told. Rather than pack in content, we opened up spaces and allowed imagery and headings to breathe. We implemented a simple palette of three colors per issue to complement the imagery, and we used minimal graphic elements to support the stories. Finally, Colloquy’s editor and our production manager specified an FSC-certified recycled paper stock in keeping with Harvard’s (and our) commitment to environmental sustainability.
In this electronic (and financially strapped) age, it can be difficult to justify printed materials. While Colloquy is by no means excessive, our re-design of the publication contributes to one of the Graduate School’s goals: “to inspire and strengthen intellectual, professional, and social connections among and between alumni and the Graduate School.”
* A colloquy \ˈkä-lə-kwē\, by the way, is a conversation; a dialogue.
Check back for my next post when I’ll take a look at the dramatic transformation of Colgate University’s alumni magazine.
Categories: Design
Are you bookin’ it to buy an iPad?
Apple has released a new product, and I’m of course a little obsessed—but not standing in line yet.
Why not?
I know it has lots of nifty features and fun things it will do, but my sticking point seems to be: Will I honestly read books on an iPad (and/or any e-reader)?
See, I’m a book fella from way back (a lifelong bibliophile who worked for two publishing houses, and also one of those snobs who much prefers hardcovers), so the first time I held an iPad and launched a book, I kept tilting it and flipping it to check out the type on the spine, the specific kind of binding, and I almost held it up to smell the ink on paper.
Therein, my predicament.
A good friend—an academic who has lived and breathed (and written) books her entire life—is about ready to give in and buy a Kindle, but mostly because she’s running out of bookshelf space. But one of her justifications is how e-readers encourage you to indulge your random thoughts and whims. In the mood for a little Shakespeare? Download Hamlet and dive into your favorite soliloquy. Need a good spook? The latest Dennis Lehane is waiting for you.
For me, aside from the first-blush physical considerations (is an e-reader, especially the iPad, too heavy and awkward to hold, and just not the same as holding a real book?), there is the same thing that has held me back from buying all my music online. I want to have and hold a book, just as I’m still intrigued by the magic of an LP cover and especially the liner notes.
To be able to go over to my bookshelf (and music shelf) and pull at random, on a whim—that for me is magical and revolutionary.
So, am I letting the future pass me by if I don’t jump on board now, or soon? While I don’t think the printed book will ever go away, the future is surely full of bytes and I should probably sink my teeth in now or risk feeling like I’m left in the dust.
And how about you?
Categories: Digital Media, Outside the Square
Seven steps to take your brand social…and still be in control
Don’t miss Tamsen’s debut MarketingProfs webinar tomorrow, April 22, at noon EST. Attendees can download a PDF of the Social Branding Scorecard, a simple but useful tool to help evaluate your current social readiness.
About the webinar:
Branding is different in the social age: You have less control of your message…but more control of your brand.
No, you’re no longer in total control of your messaging—but you never were. No matter what marketing and corporate communications you put out there, your customers always had their own opinions, and always shared those opinions with their peers and colleagues.
And now you can hear those conversations. Clearly.
But what does this mean for your branding efforts? Where do you start?
Branding is much more than drafting messages…or designing logos. It’s about managing the collective impression people gain from all of their interactions with you—and the interactions others have as well (newly amplified through social media).
If you take a social approach to branding—if you actively engage with and respond to these conversation—you can know, in an instant, whether the brand you want is the brand you have. Since you control your response, you control your brand.
In this seminar, you’ll discover a seven-step process to help you build a solid, sustainable, and social brand by actively aligning your values and operations (not just your communications) with those of your customers. You’ll also learn how seven keys to social branding—insight, relevance, identity, resonance, coherence, engagement, and evolution—serve as keys to controlling your brand.
You’ll leave knowing how to use a Social Branding Scorecard to evaluate your brand’s “social readiness,” identify the changes or improvements you need to make, and develop a strategy for building or strengthening your social brand in a way that makes the most of what you can control.
You will learn:
- How to gain control of your brand even as you “lose control” of your message
- How to build a solid and sustainable social brand
- How to align your brand with your customers’ values
- A seven-step social branding process
- The seven keys to social branding
Who should attend:
Anyone responsible for their organization’s social media, community-building, or marketing efforts who is looking for a step-by-step process for evaluating and strengthening their social branding strategy.
Categories: Branding, Strategy and Management
When does a company become a brand?
By now, most organizations, institutions, principalities, and persons have at some point worried about “getting a brand.” Some have given up, some have buckled down, and a few assert branding has jumped the shark.
There’s something to each of those responses, but at the end of the day it’s possible to point to a bunch of organizations and companies and agree they have potent brands—even if we don’t agree on what a brand is. There’s something special about them: something intangible but we feel it.
How can you tell a company (or an institution, or a community…) has become a brand? Really truly a brand and not just an identity and talking points?
- When it doesn’t need an elevator speech, a company has become a brand.
- When its name (or logo, colors, shape…) becomes as familiar as an old acquaintance—or a friend, recognized at a glance and evoking volumes in a blink.
- When there is a ghost in the machine: other people can use it in the third person singular, and the organization doesn’t have to say “our people are what makes us special” anymore.
- When its symbol replaces sentences… paragraphs… books… and defies definition or simple categorization.
- When it has fans—not just customers or members or constituents.
- When you know what it stands for even if you don’t care.
- When it’s used as an example in a completely different context… “The Ferrari of can openers.”
- When its sign conjures specific feelings—not merely communicates information.
- When it stands for more than your product or service.
- When no substitution is quite the same.
To be sure, knowing what it feels like doesn’t make it much easier to reach. Brands don’t achieve these qualities quickly or accidentally. But at least we know what to strive for, while doing all the little things right along the way.
Categories: Branding
The Apple developer paradigm: The house must be kept white and glossy
A few weeks ago, I decided to take a rather large fiscal plunge and pick up my own copy of the Adobe Production Suite CS4. It’s a great, albeit pricey, package including various pieces of industry standard video, web, and motion graphics production software like Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Premiere, After Effects, and more.
I was, of course, somewhat peeved when I discovered I’d chosen to make my purchase a mere period of weeks before the release of CS5. But hey, no big deal; the changes between these versions couldn’t possibly be too dramatic. Could they?
Of course, I then find out about all the wonderful new features in CS5, including Photoshop’s awesome new “content aware” tools:
Hyperbolic parody aside, one of the other more intriguing features is Flash CS5′s compile for iPhone capability. It implies that someone may be able to use Flash to create a multi-platform application, deliverable on the internet and the iPhone without having to redo the application in Objective-C, C++, or C. As someone who is more experienced with ActionScript/Flash than those more traditional programming languages, I found myself intrigued.
I then discovered, however, the recent hubbub around the internet regarding Apple’s latest revision to their iPhone developer agreement. In particular, the changes to section 3.3.1 that came packaged with the new OS4 beta SDK (Software Development Kit). The section used to read:
Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs.
But now reads:
Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).
Translation: build with our methods or don’t build at all.
This section now prohibits the use of any third-party compiler or development platform that doesn’t have the explicit approval of Apple. This continues a consistent trend of xenophobic company policies that have become all but expected of the contemporary Apple.
I can, however, understand why such policies are in place. For example, Apple refuses to allow its Operating Systems to be run on non-Apple hardware, a decision that forces those who enjoy the Mac GUI and infrastructure to buy Apple. Likewise, iPhone developers having to jump through Apple’s hoops corrodes the ability of competitors to profit off of creating developer tools for the platform. It also gives Apple a strong method of enforcing quality controls.
The downside? A closed ship can get stuffy. Applications developed for multiple platforms (not just the iPhone) are far less likely to dance to the tune. For example, there’s a good chance that Firefox (which I need not point out is wildly popular with Mac users) may not be developed on OS4. Likewise, singular pathways for development can stifle innovation as much as they prevent substandard apps.
The reaction among the developer community seems largely negative, though it is yet to be seen if this is simply irritation or the type of thing that will cause more than a few defections to Android. If the latter proves to be the case, then Apple may have to “think different” (see what I did there?).
For now, at least, I don’t have to feel quite as bad about being stuck with CS4.
Categories: Digital Media
A brand message test
I was recently moving some mail (the paper kind) from my inbox to my permanent outbox, aka the recycling bin. An idea struck me: “What will I take away if I read this US Postal Service brochure?” I gave it the distance from the mailbox to my desk (and trashcan) to do its job. I never thought I’d say this, but am I glad I read that postal service brochure.
Over eight large postcard-sized pages, the brochure made a simple case quick and easy to get: is your shipping complicated and expensive? We feel your pain. Our shipping is simple and costs are predictable. And here are the three simple proof points…shown in headlines and pictures.
The value proposition was not only simple, it was concrete. There wasn’t a word about their capabilities or how they do it—it was 100% about a solution to my (hypothetical) problem.
This simple message did a lot to nudge my impression of the USPS brand, and make me think about the brands of the other major retail shipping brands. USPS has a lot of brand baggage it might not deserve anymore: slow, complicated, unsophisticated. And the other big brands maybe don’t deserve all the credit for “fast, simple, modern” they still get—that we are accustomed to giving them without or despite our direct experience.
The USPS brochure exhibits the message strategy principles we advocate: clarity, proof, and focus on customer benefits.
What it also did for me, however, is show that even if your prospect isn’t paying attention or looking for you, if you’re in the right place, at the right time, with the right message, you can connect!
Brands, the Universe, and Everything
We’d like to think that we, and the brands we create and represent, are somehow exempt from the laws of the universe.
We’re not.
Brands, whether organizational, product, or personal, are as much a product of gravity as Newton’s apocryphal apple.
The Law of Brand Gravity
Every object in the universe attracts every other object in the universe with a force that’s proportional to their mass: the greater the mass, the greater the pull. When objects are of similar size (volume), their pull is determined by the density of their mass.
The distance between two objects has an inverse relationship: the smaller the distance, the greater the pull.
In branding, bigger brands (think Coke or Harley-Davidson, or even the Red Cross or Harvard) have a significant amount of “brand mass” based largely on their size. They’re huge, ergo they exert a lot of pull. The people closest to them—say, the die-hard Harley fans, third-generation Harvard alumni—feel a bond, usually in the form of loyalty, that only the strongest of external forces could break.
For personal brands, think of celebrities (entertainment, political, social media, or otherwise). There, it’s the scope and scale of fame that creates mass. The more well-known someone is, the more well-established their career and (hopefully) their fame, the wider the appeal they have to the world at large, and to their fans.
But what if your brand isn’t Apple-big, or you’re not Tom Cruise-famous? How can you take advantage of Brand Gravity?
By understanding the power of Social Density.
The Theory of Social Density
My high school days may seem a bit unrelated here, but bear with me (they were, after all, where I developed my love of physics). Back then, my friend Len Shropshire proposed his Theory of Social Density as a way to explain and understand the omnipresent social cliques and inevitable popularity shifts.
Quite simply, he said, some people had more “social density” than others, and thus exerted a greater social-gravitational pull.
Think about it: you can spot socially dense people from across a room. They’re the centers of attention, the ones people naturally, well…gravitate towards.
You can certainly see this in social media (indeed, not only did Julien Smith recently observe the “orbital” nature of social media stars, planets, and moons, but Trust Agents, his New York Times Best-selling book with Chris Brogan, is a virtual textbook on increasing social density).
The same theory applies to brands as well. The brands with greater density exert a greater pull on their fans, and on the marketplace.
Like people with high social density, you can easily spot brands with high brand density. Not only do they have a galaxy of devoted fans surrounding them, but their pull affects the course of similar and competitor brands around them (think of how an innovation by Apple or Google has a ripple effect through their industries).
The Brand Boson
But where does “brand mass” come from?
In physics, that question is answered by the still-hypothetical existence of the Higgs Boson, a particle, scientists theorize, that gives all others their mass. No one’s ever seen it…but we do see the effects we think it explains.
In branding, you can’t see the unique, irreducible core that gives rise to your brand’s total mass, either, but we can define it—your brand’s core purpose, its unique brand foundation—and the properties it holds.
Like the Higgs Boson, our “Brand Bosons” have visible effects as well. We see it in the coherence of our visual systems, the clarity and resonance of our brand messages, and in the scope, scale, and strength of customer loyalty.
Building brand mass (and thus our brand’s gravitational pull), then, is a combination of understanding what it is that gives rise to our brand in the first place and of actively pursuing ways to increase its density (a process we here at Sametz call social branding).
•
So the next time you’re trying to understand brands, the universe, and everything? Look no further than the apple (or Apple!) in your hand.
Categories: Branding, Strategy and Management
Twitter
LinkedIn