Links 3.28.08

In the kitchen with Moby

Tony Morgan on Seth Godin…
Your Branding Sucks

FortyOneTwenty
Hot church media

A surly group of friends doing great work, from their passion, here and in Rwanda.
Scallywags – I’m continually amazed by them.

Safari is still the best browsing experience, but Apple still needs to fix a few things.
$10,000 exploit

What is a brand?

This is a brilliantly well-done slideshow.

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Favorite lines:

It’s not what YOU say it is. It’s what THEY say it is.

The Focus Test:
1. Who are you?
2. What do you do?
3. What does it matter?

3 Ways to Maintain Your Identity.

Last week I shared 3 Easy Ways to Lose Your Identity. This week, I thought I’d flip it around.

Maintaining your identity essentially means you will be intentional about looking on the outside like you really are on the inside.

1. In the words of Buddha, “Be One With Everything.”

In everything you do, maintain one front, one ethos, one spirit that is supported by the overall purpose of your organization. Don’t stray from your purpose. What drives your organization? That should drive your identity too. Remember that identity design is simply about making your outside appearance match the inner heartbeat of the organization. Don’t let the two go in different directions.

2. In the words of Outkast, “So Fresh, So Clean.”

Maintaining your identity doesn’t mean that the same look you had back in ‘88 should still be lingering in ‘08. Your audience changes and so should you. Freshen up. Clean out. Your logo might stay the same, but you can modernize your logo without changing everything. Subtle shifts in color to keep the palette current or even font variations can help you keep your look familiar to your long-term audience while growing and reaching new markets. Don’t be afraid to freshen up a bit.

3. In the words of Madonna, “Express Yourself!”

What’s brilliant and innovative about you. What do you do that sets you apart from the next organization? Your Identity should express yourself. Take all that is unique about you and let your audience know about it and celebrate it. If hip hop is your sound and your culture, then don’t be trendy and scenester. If you use flashy media in your worship services, don’t dilute your print materials by keeping them mundane. Your potential audience needs a reason to choose you over everything else in their lives. Show them why you’re unique and you just might give them a good enough reason.

3 Easy ways to lose your identity.

1. Have too many of them.

Not everything in your organization needs a name, logo and stylesheet all to itself. When you overbrand, you dilute your core message. When everything has it’s own identity, you end up competing with yourself. It’s like Fight Club all over again.

 

2. Borrow it from Someone else.

It’s easy to get inspired by design. Somethings are just drop dead beautiful. But it’s hard to be yourself, if you’re trying to be somebody else. Be inspired, but design yourself, don’t design to be somebody else.

 

3. All Sparkle, No Substance.

Design is great, when it communicates truth. if you’re trying to sell yourself as more than you really are, eventually, people will figure you out. You can only fool people for so long. A candy coated brussels sprout isn’t going to hide the bitter taste when you bite into the core.

As a designer, I’ve been guilty of all of these, but I always strive to be a better communicator.

a thing called redwire

Neeraj wrote a little about Redwire and being an entrepreneur. 

He pointed to this piece we just did for a good friend and client with a great business model and skills to match. 

I promise not to get all Obama crazy on this blog…

However, I can’t believe how well done this video is…

I couldn’t turn it off. 

Imagine building your entire brand on the hope for something better. On the hope that we want to take care of each other. On the reality that if we don’t actively participate in our future, the future will be dictated to us.

Sound like anyone you know?

Obama picks up 3 more states

One of the many differences between Barack and Hillary are their websites. 

Who in the world designed Barack’s site? It’s beautiful.

It’s clear, from the get go, Barack has had a very clear strategy on the web reaching out to a younger more web 2.0 audience. And it’s worked. I can’t recite verbatim the numbers I’ve read over the last few weeks, but it’s clear, he’s been right on with creating a grassroots campaign through the under 40 crowd and has raised insane amounts of money, with insane numbers of contributors on the web.

It becomes clear when you look at the two sites next to each other. While Clinton’s site isn’t horrible, I find things more distracting on the site. There’s so many levels trying to attract attention, that I inevitably don’t land anywhere.

These sites actually match up with their personalities.

Clinton’s is a bit louder, Obama’s a bit more serene.

Clinton’s tries to have the gooey web 2.0 feel, but misses the mark with a color palette that is bit too traditional.

Obama’s nails the color palette and has an ethereal feel which really does fall on the message of hope that he tries to convey.

I’m not announcing anything new, but our web strategy at the church will be evolving over the course of 2008. I hope we land on our target audience a bit more solidly, and offer more reasons to keep coming back…

The Dissemination of Brand Ideas and the Long Tail of Brand Communication

There’s a great new manifesto over at Change This.

Essientially, I think it asks the question:  Who else could be your customer if you were not beholden to one idea for brand communication?

In the new age of micro media devices (no longer just 3 major tv networks and 4 major radio networks rather millions of outlets through websites, blogs, podcasts, iptv, and more….) the old idea that your brand represents one message that has to hit a mass of people is slowly dying. 

 

Who could your customer be if you knew you could communicate to them on their time, in their space, in their language and lifestyle?

 

You’re no longer trying to communicate with 51% of your potential market with one message, but using an array of messages to communicate with 100% of your potential market.

 

The author asks us to focus on these two imperatives to reach the alternate audience instead of the mass audience: 

• Make everything available
• Help me find it.  

He offers these steps to reach the alternate audience:

1. Seek help in populating the curve.
2. Time is a natural elongating-agent.
3. Ones and twos add up to quite a few.
4. Employ recommendation and word-of-mouth buzz.
5. Don’t predict; measure and respond.
6. Context is more important than content.
7. Context is more important than content. (know what messages can’t help you)
8. Trade control for influence. 

What does this mean for the church?

I hate commoditizing Jesus, but I wonder who we’re missing with the Gospel by deploying mass market campaigns over micro-market campaigns.

 

Innovation vs. Renovation Part 2 – renovation is harder…

One thing I learned early on from reading the Art of Innovation is that renovation is often much harder than innovation.

It’s one thing to have a problem that nobody has solved yet. Your solution is the best solution by definition of being the only solution. In the case of the grocery store shopping cart that IDEO was charged with renovating, the challenge was clear: Make the best shopping cart ever. The problem however was deeper: Rethink the grocery shopping experience so that the design and functionality of the shopping cart matches the reality of your shopping experience or makes it a more desirable experience.

So they had to dive in and rethink things from the moment you walk in the store. Whether you’re the urban hipster, the soccer mom, or the daily shopper. The results were drammatic. The traditional shopping cart took on the form of this multi-compartment hodgepodge of speciaiized functionality.I don’t think it was that great.In fact, it looked bulky and awkward. Spaceage and untouchable….(yet fascinating).

The reality is the traditional shopping cart meets most of the needs we ask of it. And even if IDEO’s cart is a good design, the awkwardness of it compared with something I’m used to, makes it harder to adopt in it’s renovated state.

Last year when I started renovating my kitchen, I would have begged for a blank slate to work with. Not bad wiring, banged up walls and 5 layers of flooring. It would have been much easier to start with nothing but studs, but instead, it was a renovation job. It required rethinking how to make something old into something new. Something broken into something that works. Something stylishly outdated into something fresh, modern and visually appealing.

It took sweat. And it’s still not done.

Renovation can be much harder than innovation. 

<p>How well does the church renovate?

The Art of Innovation – 5 Step Process

I’m currently reading “The Art of Innovation“ by Tom Kelley.Tom and his Brother David are head honchos at IDEO, America’s Leading Design Firm. 
Through the years, they’ve developed a simple strategy for unleashing innovation at IDEO. It boils down to this:

1. UNDERSTAND – not only the market, the client and the technology, but also the perceived constraints on the problem. 
2. OBSERVE – Real people in real life. Not focus groups. Real people trying to tackle the problems you want to help them with. 
3. VISUALIZE – The brainstorming session. If I was faced with the problem, what challenges would I be weighed down with and what are creative ways to solve that problem.
4. EVALUATE & REFINE – What works, what doesn’t, what confuses people, what they seem to like. Test, Modify, Retest.
5. IMPLEMENT – If the idea is great  and you can’t implement it, than the idea is of little value.

It’s not rocket science. It’s just about having a managed approach to Creativity and having a roadmap to take the next big thing from beginning to end.  Any thoughts?