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Customer Experience Management

March 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment

I just returned from the Adobe Enterprise Partner Community Days Conference in New Orleans, LA. While there were a number of interesting presentations, one of the most engaging was by Bruce Temkin, entitled “The 6 Imperatives of Customer Experience”.  His blog is called “Customer Experience Matters”.  It is a gold mine in terms of great, to-the-point info-graphics that highlight the research Bruce and his organization is doing.  See below for example:

Consumer Experience Sharing by Channel

As a start, check out his FREE e-book, “The Six Laws of Customer Experience“

 

Filed Under: Brand, Customer Experience Management, Strategy, Tools

The Art of Story in Presentation

March 7, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Nancy Duarte’s talk at TEDx East from Duarte Design on Vimeo.

How would you like to present your Brand’s next big idea with the precision and passion of Apple’s Steve Jobs iPhone introduction or Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech?  A friend sent me an email this weekend with the link to Nancy Duarte’s video presentation at TEDx East on Vimeo (embedded above).  Having recently read Nancy’s book, “Resonate“, the video codified the elements she puts forward in the book:

  • Connect with your audience empathetically
  • Craft ideas that get repeated
  • Rely on story structures inherent in great communication
  • Create captivating content
  • Inspire enthusiasm and support for your vision

The video is 20 minutes long but well worth the investment of your time and attention.

 

Filed Under: Brand, Strategy, Tools

HBN Brand Design Wins Package Design Magazine’s Makeover Challenge

December 16, 2010 By Leave a Comment

HBN Brand Design Wins Makeover Challenge

We are exposed to thousands of packaging designs every day as modern consumers.  From the wrappers on the candy by our favorite supermarket checkout stand to the hardshell plastic packaging that seems to have been designed specifically to keep the customer from getting to the product they purchased, each is a result of a packaging and brand designers use of their special powers.  Let’s step behind the scenes of an award-winning design firm, HBN Brand Design, headquartered in Chicago, Illinois and take a look at how they used their powers for good to redesign the Sun & Earth product packaging, an effort that won them the Package Design Magazine’s Annual Makeover Challenge.  According to Dwight Nelson, President of HBN Brand Design,

“Our goal was to give the Sun & Earth brand a memorable image and ownable design that reflects their brand values of natural, safe, gentle and effective.

Our first step in creating a new look was to review the competition. Although some of the larger brands do a good job of creating strong brand recognition through simple messaging, we felt that most of the existing brands in the marketplace are busy, clunky and industrial looking, rather than natural and safe feeling.

After reviewing the competition and pouring over Sun & Earth’s information, we saw the opportunity to not only reflect the brand essence, but to attract a broader audience to the Sun & Earth brand through a contemporary, consumer- friendly design. We also decided to create a design that would lift the quality perception of the Sun and Earth products.”

The full case study can be found by clicking here.

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Keeping It Simple – WhiteyBoard Peel-and-Stick Whiteboards

December 14, 2010 By Leave a Comment

I was reading the the December/January issue of Inc. Magazine and came across an article by Issie Lapowsky that highlighted a great tool for those of us who need to draw our ideas out — peel-and-stick whiteboards.  I have never had enough whiteboard surface around to scribble on so hats off to the founders of WhiteyBoards – Saachi Cywinski, Jason Wilk, and Sherwin Kim.  Being astute at leveraging social media, the WhiteyBoards.com team had placed a Facebook “Like” button on their website which I clicked to share the delight of my find with my Facebook friends.  My friends comments in response were positive about the product but all questioned the common sense of the company name — WhiteyBoard.

So I reached out to the company and asked the question, “Would you share how you came up with the name?”  I received a response from founder Saachi Cywinski within minutes – “Our name WhiteyBoard is derived from Whiteboard, and we just added a Y. Then we thought about changing our name to AngloBoard, however we thought we may get some negative feedback if we called it that.”

So what do you think of the name WhiteyBoard? Can it pass muster in our hypersensitive politically correct world?

By the way, I ordered several of the 2′ X 3′ “Alice” versions of their product — perfect for my home office and my son’s dorm room at Caltech. Click on over to WhiteyBoard.com and order a few for yourself!

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Where are the Eco-Friendly Gift Boxes?

November 17, 2010 By 2 Comments

Gap Gift Box ImageI was cleaning out a section of my basement last weekend and came across our collection of gift boxes from nationally branded department stores like Nordstrom, Macy’s,  Gap, Talbots, and the like.  As a family, we save gift boxes and reuse them primarily for Christmas and birthday giving.  This helps to keep from contributing to the 5 million tons of wrapping ingredients that will end up in landfills this holiday season.  It got me to thinking, why don’t these Brands offer an eco-friendly version of their gift boxes and/or offer me an incentive (read – discount) to bring the box in this holiday season and let them box/wrap my newly purchased gifts into them?  In fact, the packaging could become an interesting secondary discount coupon in itself that lives on and could be used to incent friends or family receiving the gifts to return to the Brand’s store and receive a nominal discount on their next purchase.

Special thanks to the San Angelo Standard Times for the article – “Go Green With Holiday Cleanup”  for the landfill statistic and practical suggestions for reducing your holiday packaging impact.

Author Update:

Gucci Packaging

A quick update to this post with a special thank you to JoAnn Hines at packagingdiva.com for providing this bit of information.  Gucci offers eco-friendly packaging at their 284 flagship store locations.  According to the blog, upscaleswagger.com, “Gucci is taking the initiative to go green by implementing new eco-friendly packaging. The fashion brand wants to reduce dependence on materials and use 100% recyclable paper in packaging, so their revamping all packaging from the shopping bags to the gift boxes and even as little as to the tissue and ribbon that they use.”  Full post is here.

Are you interested in offering Eco-friendly holiday bags and gift boxes?  Check out the folks at Nashville Wraps.  They have a whole line of eco-friendly packaging called Green Way ®.

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What’s in a Name?

November 5, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Magnifying GlassHave you ever wondered what the origin of  your favorite Brand name is?  What was behind the naming of Starbucks, Oracle, or 3M?  There are a number of resources that can help you.  First stop, the Wikipedia “List of Company Name Etymologies” .  Many companies list that tidbit in the company history section of their website.  For example, Yahoo! is an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”.

What interesting parts of your Brand history are you leaving to other outside sources such as websites, bloggers or authors?  Does your company name have an interesting origin — leave me a comment and tell us a brief story.

By the way, Starbucks was name for the character Starbuck from a Herman Melville novel, Oracle was the code name for a consulting project Larry Ellison, Ed Oates and Bob Miner were working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and 3M comes from the company’s original name, Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company.

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Sears Goes Zombie

October 28, 2010 By 3 Comments

Sears Blue Zombie CrewMy friend Benjamin Nelson, Creative Director at Headstand Media just posted a great site review of the Sears Zombie website.  It is quite refreshing to see a mature Brand like Sears take some risk and have some fun with the zombie craze sweeping the traditional media channels.  Be sure and check out the videos on the site, they are really quite humorous.

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Brands with Strong Social Purpose – Toms Shoes

October 26, 2010 By Leave a Comment

TOMS SHOES IMAGE

My teenage son introduced me to TOMS shoes.  While the styling and comfort were appealing, the thing that really made these shoes desirable to Bradley and his friends was the fact that for each pair purchased, TOMS would give a new pair to a child in need of them.  From it’s inception, TOMS founder, Blake Mycoskie, had a vision not for a Brand but for a movement.  It is working, since it’s beginning in 2006, TOMS has given away over one million pairs of shoes.

TOMS clearly understands how to leverage the digital space to it’s advantage.  TOMS Facebook page connects its followers not with dry corporate-speak advertising but with thousands of follower-generated photos and stories.  Just one tab away, I am able to join the movement by purchasing a new pair of TOMS shoes.  On the TOMS website, my ability to share with my social network is at every level of the site, all the way down to an individual pair of shoes.

TOMS Website

By integrating the Facebook “Like” button at the product level, I am able to highlight my involvement with the TOMS movement and encourage my friends to do the same.

Finally, the simplicity of the shoes, invites the individual to make them their own by embellishing with paint, pens, thread, etc. further connecting the consumer to the Brand.

TOMS Shoes Embellished

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BrandPilgrim.com – For the Visual Thinker in All of Us

October 21, 2010 By Leave a Comment

BrandPilgrim.com BlogSuma Mandagiri authors the blog, BrandPilgrim.com .  Rather than trying to describe it, here is an extract from her “About” page:

My name is Suma Mandagiri.  I live in Mumbai, India and work as an independent strategic branding consultant.

Brandpilgrim.com is a visual thinking blog that attempts to illustrate complex concepts in a simple manner.  As humans, we ideate in pictures, linkages and patterns.  It is only later that we weave our seemingly disjointed impressions into a vocal framework that is presented in neat rows as evidence of our organised thinking.  In the process, we sacrifice emotive expressions and sensorial engagement.

Brandpilgrim.com is an attempt to return us to the quirky thinking that takes the form of doodles, scribbles and caricatures on our notepads.  I believe, what we classify as ‘doodle  scrap’  are powerful repositories of knowledge and inspiration.  Beneath the quirkiness lies an organic thought process that does not need the crutch of a long-winded explanation.  And if you are like me, you respond to colours, forms and shapes with primitive glee.

With this blog, I hope to encourage you to unwrap those balls of paper that you usually reserve for your trash bin and share those precious nuggets of information with the rest of us.

Suma Mandagiri

I especially liked her Oct 17, 2010 post – Why Brands Can’t Ignore Social Media Mavens.  Click on over and check it out!  You will be glad you did.

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